On any given day, more than 100,000 flights take off and land safely worldwide, making aviation the safest way to travel. This is due in part to the aerospace industry’s stringent regulations and certification processes for the components that comprise each aircraft.
While highly regulated, the industry is also innovative in its adoption of advanced manufacturing technologies such as additive manufacturing (AM). As a result, parts produced with AM are already in flight on aircraft around the world. However, while 78% of companies use AM in prototyping, the technology is less frequently used for flight-ready, end-part manufacturing.
As a relatively young production method, AM simply does not have as much production data as traditional manufacturing methods to prove parts built to a given specification will always meet the safety criteria for their functionality. However, there are possibilities to advance in qualification processes for low- or no-criticality parts, as well as for more consistent qualification processes for critical ones.
Looking specifically at low-criticality parts such as interior cabin panels, functional brackets or ventilation system components, AM has already shown its value. At Materialise, we print about 700 part series in this category per year, with 26,000 of these individual parts printed for the Airbus A350 ecosystem alone.
When these are designed for AM, aerospace manufacturers can benefit from lightweight parts, quick and easy iterative adjustments to optimize performance, and part consolidation for simplified assembly. Especially attractive among these are supply chain benefits, enabling more efficient ordering, reduction of stock issues, and small to mid-series production for low-criticality parts.
In support of innovation in such applications, efforts to ease the certification process for AM parts are already underway, and regional agencies have begun to take steps to facilitate AM’s adoption. For example, the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) issued a memorandum in 2020 that recognized a distinction between low- and high-criticality parts, and encouraged design organizations (DOAs) and production organizations (POAs) to collaborate on part qualification for the former.
In critical-part qualification, AM can also add value through engine and structural components, as seen in parts such as turbine blades produced for GE Aerospace’s GE9x jet engine and wingtips for Eviation’s Alice—the world’s largest all-electric aircraft, which made its maiden flight in 2022. The potential of AM in such critical parts is significant, but we’ve only scratched the surface. With the right processes and applications, AM offers the aerospace industry the ability to create lighter and stronger parts through designs that are unachievable with conventional manufacturing technologies, while offering time and cost reductions during the manufacturing process.
The certification process for these parts must be more stringent, and manufacturers must demonstrate that components will always meet performance and safety criteria. However, without standardized processes for qualifying these parts, different DOAs and regulatory bodies often have varying views on the data needed. This creates barriers to widespread AM adoption as organizations may require different data for certification.
Collaboration among these organizations will be key to fostering AM innovation in this space. By working together to create standardized certification criteria, AM could have a clearer, more consistent path to qualification for flight-ready parts. Data from low-criticality parts can also play a vital role here by providing data on part density and tensile strength, along with process control documentation to demonstrate the reliability and repeatability of certified AM production for future critical applications.
In the long term, the development of agreed-upon industry standards for AM part qualification has the potential to accelerate AM innovation across both high- and low-criticality parts. However, the AM industry also has a role to play in improving certification processes.
Collaboration and advances in digital tools will be essential in fine-tuning processes and materials for critical component manufacturing. By ensuring data is collated and analyzed throughout production to demonstrate the performance of stabilized production processes, AM stakeholders can add to the repository of available data for regulators, organizations and manufacturers to support informed, robust decision-making.
Digital tools for process control in AM will also be essential to showcase quality and consistency in production. With technology such as layer image analysis, manufacturers can provide an in-process quality control system for AM while simultaneously compiling valuable data on the consistency and quality of AM processes to aid in complex certifications.
However, that is only one strand of the digital thread required for certification. AM software platforms that connect the thread from design to delivery will be essential in monitoring, analyzing and optimizing part performance and production processes, and eventually enable localized production.
Through industry-wide collaboration to improve certification and data standardization, AM is capable of taking the next steps in aerospace, which will revolutionize how we design and build parts for the world’s safest method of transportation.
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