3D Printed Airliner Parts Face Regulatory Headwinds (wsj.com)

Some aerospace suppliers are eager to start using 3-D printing technology to turn out large, high-volume structural parts for jetliners, but U.S. safety regulators are taking a go-slow approach toward approving such production. From a report: Three-dimensional printing is a darling of the aerospace industry because it is relatively inexpensive compared with more-prevalent ways of making components. A series of announcements at the Paris Air Show expected in coming days illustrates the immense promise of airliner parts manufactured by 3-D printers -- as well as the formidable regulatory challenges confronting their widespread acceptance (alternative source). On Tuesday, officials of Norsk Titanium AS, a closely held Norwegian company that has developed a novel 3-D printing approach, will unveil a broad partnership with Spirit AeroSystems, a major subcontractor for Boeing and other industry players. Under the arrangement, Spirit sees the potential of eventually using Norsk's technology to produce thousands of different parts at 30% lower cost than traditional milling methods. However, before that can happen, the Federal Aviation Administration has to approve the overall process and certify that the cutting-edge, plasma-deposition technology is reliable enough to ensure identical strength and other properties from batch to batch. FAA officials have said they are moving cautiously, because they want to fully understand the unique technical issues.

Comments

I don't blame them

[boristdog]

This is one area where you REALLY want to make sure you get it right.

Re:I don't blame them

[Chris Mattern]

You have to prove that not only the sample test parts pass standards, but that the process is consistent and will always produce parts that meet standards. That's a little more time consuming.

Casting and milling are well understood

[Anonymous Coward]

Casting and milling are well understood. They have been used since the age of steam. Identifying defects in traditionally machined parts works so well that aircraft rarely have problems related to the manufacture of metal parts.

In a 3D printed part every one of the thousands of layers is a potential failure point. To date there is no reliable way to find a single weld failure in all those thousands of layers. Once 3D printed parts have a decade of successful use in cars then will be the time to use them in aircraft.

Re:Get It Right, But don't go Luddite

[khb]

For many classic industrial processes, we select a statistically meaningful units and test them to destruction. If the FAA is trying to fit these "one off" parts into that sort of algorithm the problem should be obvious. Each part is a "one off" and statistical reasoning about batches produced the same way don't (necessarily) apply.

For example, perhaps the Argon supplier accidentally left in some impurities (or worse, the original testing was WITH impurities which happened to help; and the new supply is actually pure ... that sort of thing has happened in the past, and it's hell to debug!).