Additive Manufacturing Challenges and Future Developments in the Next Ten Years

A significant growth of Additive Manufacturing technology has been noticed in the last few decades due to its well-established advantages. This production process based on the idea of adding material layer by layer, instead of removing it, has several advantages such as: time reduction in the design-to-manufacturing cycle, capability to produce complex shapes in a single piece thus reducing the connections, and weight saving just to mention the main significant. On the same wave of enthusiasm, the research community is significantly focused on this technology and many contributions that are focused on the whole range of aspects connected to this manufacturing way are already available. However, Additive Manufacturing is in a development phase, and the design tools, the material portfolio and the production methodologies are still far from the optimum typical of mature technologies. This paper critically reviews the Additive Manufacturing advantages and weaknesses which nowadays limits its wider application; a discussion about how these problems could be solved is included, together with an outlook of the challenges the practitioners must face off from nowadays up to a time window of ten years.