Fundamentals5 min read
Additive manufacturing is a manufacturing process, not a strategy. It earns its place when the geometry, the volume or the material makes conventional routes expensive, slow or impossible.
Strong candidates
- Internal channels or cavities that cannot be drilled or cast.
- Assemblies that can be consolidated into one component.
- Parts where mass reduction has real value — flight, rotating or reciprocating hardware.
- Low volumes: one to a few hundred parts, where tooling cannot be justified.
- Obsolete or hard-to-source components.
- Expensive alloys where machining from solid wastes most of the billet.
- Development programmes needing several design iterations quickly.
Poor candidates
- Simple prismatic or turned parts that a machine shop will produce faster and cheaper.
- High-volume production suited to casting or forging.
- Parts requiring tight tolerance and fine finish over their entire surface.
- Very large components beyond available build envelopes.
- Applications requiring a material with no qualified additive equivalent.
The hybrid answer
Most successful industrial applications are hybrid: print the complex form, machine the critical features, inspect the result. Treating additive as one operation in a manufacturing route — rather than as a replacement for the route — is what makes it work commercially.