Additive manufacturing in automotive: advantages and criticalities

Additive Manufacturing (AM) is becoming an important alternative to traditional manufacturing processes based on chip removal. In AM “the design drives the shape” concept is valid, opposed to the strategy “manufacturing drives the shape” which applies with traditional parts obtained through casting, milling, lathing processing where several design constraints should be respected. In many industries, aerospace and automotive, the lightweight design plays an important role on the means of transport performances. Owing to AM potentialities, a widerange of researches are focused on methodologies to obtain structurally optimized shapes: structures obtained through topology optimization algorithms can be manufactured only in AM due to their complex shape. The scope of this work is to analyze advantages and criticalities of AM in automotive applications: a case study to evaluate pros & cons of AM is included, together with a fuel reduction analysis which can be obtained thanks to proper lightweight design of automotive components.