Transforming metal additive manufacturing for automotive: General Motors' Anil Sachdev explores the industry's challenges with AM and what needs to change for it to become a mainstay technology

摘要

When it comes to the automotive industry, additive manufacturing (AM) is still very much the reserve of prototyping and small-volume parts, but we want to change this. Our charter is to take AM into high-volume manufacturing, making it an economically viable technology fit for automotive production. To do this we need product designs that exploit the specific benefits of AM and can also be produced economically in order to extend volumes from a dozen to at least one million per year. Until we can break this million-volume barrier, AM will keep hitting dead ends.