Quality Comparison of Three Metal Additive Manufacturing Technologies on an Automotive Sealant Nozzle

Additive Manufacturing (AM) [1] is playing every day a bigger role in the automotive industry because of its cost competitiveness, short delivery lead times and potential for design flexibility and optimization. Plastics and polymers are the most common materials used to produce AM parts in this sector, however metal AM is increasing its importance as there are specific applications that require mechanical characteristics that can only be achieved with metals such as stainless steel, titanium, hard steel, copper, aluminum, and others. There is an increasing number of metal AM technologies and Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) competing in the industry with a very widespread list of advantages and disadvantages of each of them. We are at a point where automotive manufacturers need to make a complex decision on which metal AM equipment to purchase. This paper describes the main metal AM technologies and highlight the advantages and disadvantages of each of them. Additionally, three of the most competitive Metal AM technologies are compared: Powder Bed Fusion (PBF), Metal Filament Deposition Modeling (MFDM) and Bound Metal Deposition (BMD) on a specific experimental sample. For this study, a very common and representative automotive part has been chosen that is well suited to be printed in metal and can be manufactured in the three chosen technologies. A nozzle from the automotive body plant used to distribute accuratey a sealant bead onto a body panel before the final assembly operation was selected. These sample parts have been trialed for function and evaluated in general terms from a quality point of view. The conclusions included in this paper will help the automotive industry players understand which technology to use for this specific part and other parts with similar characteristics. Additional work will focus on specific quality characteristics such as material composition, mechanical properties, dimensional accuracy, and specific defects found to compare these technologies in detail. Furthermore, a selection of other automotive parts and technologies will be necessary to enlarge the knowledge on the application of metal AM on this field.