Excerpt 2: Additive Manufacturing for Aerospace & Defense (“I want my cabin to look like this.”)

Aerospace manufacturers often produce small volumes to begin with and then customize products to customer need. Direct digital manufaturing using materials that meet FST (flame, smoke and toxicity) requirements lets manufacturers reduce cost by enabling production quantities as low as one. Requiring no tooling, additive manufacturing (a.k.a. 3D printing) enables each component to be customized in a production run without significantly affecting the manufacturing cost.

"Constant Improvement" is a Stratasys white paper that discusses additive manufacturing use by the aerospace and defense industry. Here’s the second of four excerpts along with a link to the full paper:

With the use of the material ULTEM 9085, which is a flame-, smoke- and toxicity-rated material designed decades ago by GE Plastic for commercial aircraft use, we’re starting to see acceptance by the commercial aviation industry for end-use parts, typically low-volume manufacturing but a mix of many products. For example, in the business-jet community, they may build 500 jets for 50 different customers. Each of those 50 customers is going to say, “I want my cockpit to look like this. I want my cabin to look like this.” And AM end-use parts give them the economies of scale. That flexibility to meet the needs of this wide product mix is really catching on within the general aviation community.

View or download the complete Constant Improvement white paper.

View the first excerpt previously posted the week of February 6th.