Metallic additive manufacturing: State-of-the-art review and prospects

Abstract

Additive manufacturing processes, used for more than 25 years, are no longer confined to rapid prototyping applications. Mostly used nowadays in niche markets (medical applications, aerospace..) to manufacture metallic parts, they should provide improvements in terms of time-to-market, ecological impact and design compared to traditional industrial processes. Current metallic additive manufacturing studied in this paper are Selective Laser Sintering, Direct Metal Laser Sintering, Selective Laser Melting, Electron Beam Melting and Direct Metal Deposition. The performances of these processes are investigated through criteria derived from the time cost quality triangle and some prospects concerning these processes are given. © 2011 AFM, EDP Sciences.