The aerospace industry is increasingly adopting metal additive manufacturing (AM) for both flight safety-critical aircraft parts and non-critical flight parts. The approach offers a shorter development cycle, which means products can be developed quicker and design changes easily incorporated. Similar to other 3D-printing methods, metal AM, specifically select laser melting (SLM) and electron-beam melting (EBM), builds up a part layer-by-layer by depositing thin layers of metal powder that are melted with a laser or other thermal source.
