Additive manufacturing technologies: state of the art and trends

TLDR

Additive manufacturing evolved from rapid prototyping of the 1980s, expanding from model production to industrial use with new requirements for integration, mass production, and weight reduction, and continues to advance with faster systems, new formats, and emerging applications. This review aims to give readers a comprehensive overview of additive manufacturing technologies and emerging trends across the engineering and manufacturing cycle. The authors survey the range of AM processes, recent technological advances, and the engineering workflow from 3D model management to production, providing a global perspective on the manufacturing cycle. The review highlights that additive manufacturing enables complex geometries, improves design and manufacturing effectiveness, and has spurred new economic activities and trends.

Abstract

The rapid prototyping has been developed from the 1980s to produce models and prototypes until the technologies evolution today. Nowadays, these technologies have other names such as 3D printing or additive manufacturing, and so forth, but they all have the same origins from rapid prototyping. The design and manufacturing process stood the same until new requirements such as a better integration on production line, a largest series of manufacturing or the reduce weight of products due to heavy costs of machines and materials. The ability to produce complex geometries allows proposing of design and manufacturing solutions in the industrial field in order to be ever more effective. The additive manufacturing (AM) technology develops rapidly with news solutions and markets which sometimes need to demonstrate their reliability. The community needs to survey some evolutions such as the new exchange format, the faster 3D printing systems, the advanced numerical simulation or the emergence of new use. This review is addressed to persons who wish have a global view on the AM and improve their understanding. We propose to review the different AM technologies and the new trends to get a global overview through the engineering and manufacturing process. This article describes the engineering and manufacturing cycle with the 3D model management and the most recent technologies from the evolution of additive manufacturing. Finally, the use of AM resulted in new trends that are exposed below with the description of some new economic activities.