Additive manufacturing. General principles

Since the early 1980s, the digital revolution has had a direct impact on our daily lives: increased globalization of markets, intensified competition requiring companies to be as responsive as possible, and a constant ability to adapt to new products and services.

Therefore, in order to maintain and/or gain new market share in light of the accelerated product renewal cycle, companies must control their costs, continuously improve the quality of their products or services, and drastically reduce their development and time-to-market.

To meet these essential criteria for success, companies are constantly adapting to new external environments and must integrate technologies resulting from digital transformation into their design processes (and their organization).

The first patent (July 16, 1984) related to Additive Manufacturing (AM), filed by the team of Jean-Claude André (CNRS), Alain Le Méhauté (Alcatel), and Olivier de Witte (Cilas), sparked a revolution in the field of manufacturing processes and, by extension, in the field of production. From a single manufacturer in 1986 (3D Systems), the number had grown to about fifty by 2015. Since then, the landscape has undergone a profound transformation: the range of offerings has diversified significantly, and the number of players has increased markedly, driven by the proliferation of processes, the expansion of application markets, and the industrialization of the sector. As a result, by 2024, more than 130 manufacturers were offering metal-based systems, in addition to numerous manufacturers specializing in polymers, ceramics, or hybrid equipment.

Today, FA is impacting all sectors of industry, particularly the automotive, aerospace, and medical industries. At the same time, the recent boom in artificial intelligence and generative tools is helping to accelerate these transformations by bringing new optimization and automation capabilities to the digital supply chain.

During the early years of FA (the 1990s and 2000s), applications focused primarily on the early stages of product design: visual models, functional models, and technological prototypes, as well as the exploration of so-called rapid tooling design. It was not until the 2010s that the processes reached a level of maturity that allowed for the mass production of manufactured parts. Subsequently, AM became more accessible through the development of a comprehensive software ecosystem: tools for manufacturing preparation and support structure generation, simulation and compensation, optimization (including topological optimization), automation of post-processing, and monitoring/traceability tools, all of which helped to standardize and industrialize its use.

...