Additive Manufacturing

Additive manufacturing has long been used in the aerospace industry to build functional prototypes used to evaluate form, fit and function. But machine improvements and new materials have opened up the potential for producing manufacturing tooling used to align, assemble, clamp, hold test and calibrate components and sub-assemblies at all stages of the manufacturing process. A key advantage of creating these tools with FDM (Fused Deposition Modeling) is that they can be produced in less time with fewer steps than traditional means. If the first iteration isn't acceptable, the design is modified and a new tool is produced, typically in hours.

"Constant Improvement" is a Stratasys white paper that talks about the latest trends in the use of additive manufacturing in the aerospace and defense industry. Here’s the first of four excerpts from the paper along with a link to the full paper:

With computing power becoming faster and cheaper, and over the last five years with a broader suite of materials becoming available, additive manufacturing has expanded into fabrication and assembly tooling. Tooling is really catching on at U.S.military depots, particularly with the Navy and Marine fleet readiness centers. They’re using it for making one-off repairs, small-volume sets of skins or repair parts for damaged vehicles.

View or download the complete Constant Improvement white paper.