Airbus using w-DED to 3D print titanium aircraft structures

It’s no secret that aerospace giant Airbus leverages additive manufacturing in its development and production: just last month the company revealed it was 3D printing over 25,000 flight-ready parts from plastic every year. Now, the aircraft manufacturing company has disclosed more details on how it is using metal AM—specifically wire-Directed Energy Deposition (w-DED)—to create structural aircraft parts from titanium while benefiting from a reduction in material waste.

According to Airbus, w-DED is increasingly being used at its factories and is helping the company progress to a more efficient and agile manufacturing future, one where the use of high-value materials like titanium is maximized and costly and time intensive tooling is no longer needed. Notably, while Airbus has leveraged powder-bed fusion metal AM extensively for the production of small components, its adoption of w-DED is enabling the production of large-scale parts up to seven meters in length and is unlocking faster print rates (“from hundreds of grams per hour to several  kilograms per hour”).

Another key benefit of the technology has been design consolidation, or the combination of several separate parts into a single design, which minimizes production steps and assembly. As the company says: “This ability to merge multiple components into one will simplify the supply chain, reduce assembly labour, shorten cycle time and unlock the full potential of the next generation of 3D-designed airliners.”

The focus has been on titanium for several reasons. For one, the metal has a combination of properties (i.e. a great strength-to-weight ratio and compatibility with carbon fiber composite structures) that are critical for aircraft. For another, titanium is also an expensive metal and is not known to have a good buy-to-fly ratio (as much as 95% of the raw material can end up being recycled with traditional forging). With w-DED, by contrast, the ability to create near-net structures additively means that only a minimal amount of the raw material is machined to achieve tight tolerances.

One use case for w-DED has been large parts for the A350 aircraft’s Cargo Door Surround area. The components, designed by Airbus as part of an exploratory phase, were 3D printed by an external supplier and ultrasonically inspected by NDT specialist Testia Bremen. Once approved, the parts were machined and installed at Airbus factories. As Airbus explains, the 3D printed titanium components are “functionally and geometrically identical” to their forged counterparts, but deliver significant savings in terms of waste and cost. Airbus plans to leverage w-DED for more critical applications following this successful use case, including wings and landing gear components.

The use of w-DED is still in its early stages at Airbus, and the company and its partners are still testing the use of different energy sources (u.e. plasma, arc welding, electron beam, laser beam) as well as determining whether it is more beneficial to outsource the printing or to bring the machines in house. This investigation is being carried out at an “Airbus group level”, which means there will be a company-wide industrial standard for the use of the metal AM technology.