Towards Large Parts Manufacturing in Additive Technologies for Aerospace and Automotive applications

Well-established advantages as design freedom, acceleration of design-to-manufacturing cycle, decreased internal logistics reflect on the wider application of Additive Manufacturing as the main manufacturing process. However, its application to large-scale components manufacturing is still an open challenge, because of the limited printing volume available in off-the-shelf machines, slow manufacturing process, and low production volume. After a review of the available contributions, this paper proposes a methodology to handle large-scale 3D models, to be applied before the slicing process. The methodology is based upon the large-scale component subdivision into subparts within CAD environments, using an innovative approach tailored to the problem, and exploits the multi-head capability of collaborative large-scale AM machines. A UAV fixed-wing shows the positive effects in terms of speeding up the manufacturing process. The approach can significantly reduce the printing time of large parts, but a new generation of Additive Manufacturing machines is required to exploit the methodology.