How additive manufacturing can take your industry to new heights

by John Duffy, Thursday, 17th February 2022

What do you think of when someone mentions a major breakthrough in the aviation industry? Supersonic jet engines? Flying cars? Electric-powered aircraft? Perhaps what doesn’t come to mind is a jet engine fuel nozzle – yet this walnut-sized piece of technology has caused a revolution in commercial jet engines, making them more fuel-efficient than ever. And 3D printing is the only way to make them.

Additive manufacturing (AM), commonly known as 3D printing, is fast taking off as an efficient, sustainable, and cost-effective way to produce a wide range of components. For the jet engine fuel nozzle – which requires around 20 components to assemble manually – AM has enabled a one-step build process to make its manufacture viable. Plus, AM removes the need for complex shipping arrangements to move instruments from place to place, relying instead on digital files to print products on-demand. From aerospace to automotive engineering, and from the medical to the dental industry, this evolving technology is revolutionizing industries across the world.

The material monitoring challenge

But as exciting as the possibilities are in AM, the process itself is not without its challenges. One of the biggest obstacles to the widespread adoption of AM is that it relies on a careful, layer-by-layer process to build up products, which means accuracy and repeatability are critical to its success. On top of this, input materials must be carefully monitored and optimized. In processes that use powder as the raw material, for example, just one particle could contaminate the rest of the material, impacting the overall quality of the end product.

And that’s not all. Another significant consideration for many manufacturers is the safety certification process for AM products. Safety is naturally an essential step in qualifying materials, such as metal powders, for AM, and AM-manufactured components for the market. But often, industry standards fail to fully consider the complexity of AM processes.

Paving the way for pioneering innovation

At Malvern Panalytical, we’re helping industries face these challenges head-on. With our broad range of material characterization instruments for particle size and shape analysis, polymer analysis, elemental analysis, and structural and crystallographic analysis, we’re helping to pave the way for reliable, efficient, and cutting-edge AM innovation. Not only this but our analytical tools can be employed across a wide range of AM processes including powder bed fusion, fused deposition modeling, stereolithography, and binder/material jetting.

By providing the tools for effective material characterization, we enable a careful quality-control process, which leads to products that are safer and more effective. In addition, the insights gained from the material analysis process can be used as evidence either for compliance with existing regulations and standards or in support of new standards and materials.

We can go further together

But we don’t just sell our instruments – we support our customers to use them, and we teach them to interpret the results for their specific application. How? By providing insights into the application, measurements, and process of AM, helping our customers better understand the behavior of their materials, and showing them the optimal measurement techniques for characterizing them. Plus, through collaboration with a broad range of industries and academic institutions, we play a key role in the AM ecosystem. And if this wasn’t enough, our website is packed with whitepapers, application notes, and educational webinars, so you can easily access our knowledge and industry insight.

Unlocking global potential

AM has finally become an established manufacturing tool in the aerospace and automotive industries – but what’s next? From 3D-printed houses to electronics, from batteries to pharmaceuticals, AM has the potential to transform manufacturing processes across the world. By working with our customers to develop and enhance further AM solutions, we can help make these possibilities a reality. And we like to think that we’re off to a flying start…

Would you like to know more about our solutions for additive manufacturing? Check out our dedicated industry pages.

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