Aerospace is gradually looking at new ways to replace metals with plastics, and existing plastics with even better, modern plastics, composites, and manufacturing methods. Traditionally, aircraft structures have been made from metals, and more recently from composites. Composite manufacturing itself is labor intensive, but modern composites can offer superior performance to both metals and plastics. […]

How do you get the best value from additive manufacturing, while scaling from prototyping up to larger production runs? One way to do that is to pack your parts onto the print bed and stack them high, as densely as possible. By taking this route, you increase the number of parts in a single print […]

It’s Olympics time in Japan, and that means it’s time for sports equipment manufacturers to show off their wares to the sports-spectating public at large. Last week we had a little chat with Dimitris Katsanis, Founder and CEO at Metron A. E. Ltd, who are based in Nottingham U.K. Metron A.E (“Additive Engineering”) specializes in […]

Molding composites in autoclaves can be very time consuming. Finding the right balance of heat and temperature to apply while maintaining a reasonable output of parts can be a never ending task. In some cases, the molded fiber/thermoset part can sit curing in a hot autoclave for up to twelve hours. For every hour a […]

A kart racing team in Poland has made use of additive manufacturing to further reduce the weight of their already lean PMT-03 racing machine. The PRz Racing Team, based in Rzeszów, Poland, have been building their small but rapid race cars and entering them into the Formula Student university racing competitions since 2015. There have […]

The European Space Agency’s 15-year Advanced Research in Telecommunications Systems (ARTES) Program is aimed at stimulating R&D and creating innovative products for the global space-based comms market. The Spacebus NEO satellite platform specifically, from Thales Alenia Space, is one part of that program that has been benefiting from additive manufacturing, as we are about to see.

Bollard is a strange word and is not widely used outside of the UK and America. So just to clarify, a bollard is a small vertical post made out of some heavy material (normally wood, metal or concrete). Generally they are found at quaysides for mooring boats, or at the roadside, for preventing road vehicles […]

Post-processing of metal AM parts can account for a significant portion of the total cost of making the part, with figures ranging from 26% (according to Wohler’s Report 2019) to over 70% according to other reports and personal experience). Much of that post-processing involves manually removing support materials and cleaning up the remnants of the […]

3D printed bridges are apparently like buses in the sense that you wait a lifetime for one to materialize, and then two show up at once. And that is exactly what has happened this week as both China and the Netherlands have installed 3D printed bridges and revealed them to the public. Read on to […]

Canada-based aerospace company Delson Aeronautics has won engineering support to assist with the development of their new super quiet drone propellers, which are said to be 50% quieter than commercially available alternatives currently on the market. The contest, hosted on engineering community website Wevolver.com and sponsored by Mitsubishi Chemical Advanced Materials (MCAM), asked members of […]