How is Addictive Manufacturing Benefitting the Automotive Industry?

Acknowledging the dominance of traditional manufacturing methods, additive manufacturing is being adopted in many industries, including automotive, impacting the sector's prospect.

Fremont, CA: Additive manufacturing (AM) is adopted in numerous industries, offering one-of-a-kind advantages and challenges for each. According to research, the automotive and aerospace and defense sectors were two of the largest markets for additive manufacturing. Combining these two industries are responsible for more than one-third of industrial system sales by revenue. Here are the impacts of this technology on the global industry.

Prototypes and development

Many car manufacturers and automotive suppliers are leveraging AM technology to develop functional prototype components and design samples. This largely reduces the development time and costs, but it does not support mass productions as well.

There is rapid development in 3D printing of tools used in the traditional manufacturing process, and this offers enormous potential for the automotive OEMs and the tire-one suppliers alike as it can decrease the development cycles. Therefore AM could be able to help the industry to optimize the capital-intensive progress of new products.

Quality, process, and automation

AM still has a long way to go and overcome hurdles related to quality assurance and productivity. In the current scenario, a low degree of automation in AM is witnessed where there no fixed guarantee of the process stability.

Integration for series production

According to recent research, AM accounts for only 0.5 percent of the total production market. For future series productions, AM has the capability to digress from long assembly lines to island production. Therefore instead of one long production line, the manufacturers can use small AM cell units for production.

It is predicted that in the future, AM production lines should help in possibly producing at least 50,000 components in a year in common parts production and more than 10,000 individual and spare parts under high quality and cost pressure.

Although AM processes are still young, it is not possible to imagine the automotive industry without them.