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Additive Manufacturing in Aerospace
Additive Manufacturing in Aerospace: Highlights from the AMA 2018 international conference in Bremen Much of metal Additive Manufacturing’s recent success has been driven by the aerospace sector, where demanding applications have propelled progress in all aspects of the technology, from process stability and quality to part design and materials. Together, these advances are enabling metal AM to meet the next challenge: that of wider serial production. As the University of Bremen’s Christian Kober reports, it was this challenge that formed the central theme at this year’s International Conference on Additive Manufacturing in Aerospace.
After a successful first conference in 2016, over 130 participants from more than fourteen countries came together in Bremen, Germany, from September 19–20, 2018, for the International Conference on Additive Manufacturing in Aerospace (AMA). Whilst around a third of the attendees came from research institutes, the majority of participants consisted of representatives from numerous companies in the space and aerospace industries. Among those were global players including Airbus, Boeing, Ariane Group and MTU Aero Engines, AM machine manufacturers such as EOS and Trumpf, and a number of small to medium-sized enterprises in the relevant fields. More than twenty presentations were given over the course of the two-day event, all of them on the theme ‘Challenges of AM Serial Production’. These were complemented by a small exhibition and a poster presentation session where each poster’s authors presented their topic in a four-minute talk.
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This was followed by a longer poster session, in which detailed discussions with other participants were encouraged. The conference programme was organised into five sessions addressing the process chain for AM serial production, AM-related light-
weight design, part testing and quality assurance, high-production rate AM technologies, and data handling and simulation-driven solutions. Given its central theme of AM for serial production, the conference programme was structured with a clear industrial focus. However, with
Fig. 1 The International Conference on Additive Manufacturing in Aerospace (AMA) took place in Bremen, Germany, a leading city for aerospace engineering for more than a hundred years (Image courtesy Flughafen Bremen)
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