What aerospace manufacturers need is agility in their design and production processes to help mitigate the variability in supply and demand. Additive Manufacturing is one innovation in which aerospace companies have significantly invested to try to address some of their unique challenges — from replacing obsolete parts on aging fleets to shortening the path between a design change and a flight-ready component. Across programs from commercial aviation to defense platforms, AM is becoming a foundational element of the modern, digital aerospace factory.
How Is Additive Manufacturing Used in Aerospace?
Additive manufacturing covers a wide range of applications in aerospace, and most programs start with the lower-risk ones before moving toward flight-critical parts.
Rapid Prototyping and Tooling
Prototyping remains one of the most common entry points for AM in aerospace. Engineers can produce a physical iteration of a design in days rather than weeks, test fit and form, and move to the next revision without waiting on a traditional tooling cycle. The same logic extends to manufacturing aids — jigs, fixtures and tooling used on the shop floor — which can be printed on demand and adapted as a production process evolves.
Spares, MRO and Obsolete Parts
Aircraft stay in service for decades, which means the original supplier of a given part may no longer exist, or the tooling to make it may be long gone. AM has become a practical way to reproduce these obsolete parts from a digital design, including for military platforms where the U.S. Air Force and other operators have turned to 3D printing to replace components no longer available through traditional supply chains. Printing replacement parts on demand also reduces the amount of inventory that needs to be carried and stored, which matters most in remote locations or during military operations where logistics support is limited.
Structural and Non-Structural Parts
Major manufacturers have deployed AM for both structural and non-structural aircraft parts, reporting real gains in weight reduction and performance. A single 3D-printed component can often replace what used to be an assembly of several smaller subcomponents, simplifying both the design and the supply chain behind it.
Propulsion, Nozzles and Passive RF Hardware
Propulsion systems benefit particularly well from AM’s ability to integrate heat-exchanging structures directly into a single printed design, maximizing heat transfer and minimizing temperature fluctuations. Nozzles built from advanced ceramic-metal composites have shown a theoretical weight reduction of around 40% along with improved creep resistance compared with traditional nickel-based superalloys. AM is also used to produce passive RF hardware — the family of parts that conduct an electromagnetic signal — where complex internal geometries are difficult or impossible to achieve with conventional machining.
Functionally Graded and Layered Components
Additive layer manufacturing also makes it possible to build functionally graded materials, depositing a wear-resistant or corrosion-resistant layer directly onto the surface of a component rather than treating the whole part uniformly. This lets engineers put the right material property exactly where it is needed — for example, a hard-wearing surface on a part that otherwise needs to stay lightweight.
What Are the Benefits of Additive Manufacturing?
Additive Manufacturing is accelerating the development phase and reducing time to market. In the virtual environment, it is possible to develop finished parts directly. Additionally, a single printer can build various complex parts with adjustable designs at the same time. Consequently, the need for larger plants and increased capital expenditure is lower.
Weight is one of the clearest, most measurable benefits of AM in aerospace. Any reduction in aircraft weight improves fuel efficiency and cuts operating costs, and for aeronautical structures, that demand for lighter parts translates directly into fuel savings and reduced carbon emissions across an aircraft’s entire lifecycle. Because AM removes many of the design restrictions imposed by traditional machining, engineers can hollow out or lattice internal structures in ways that would simply not be possible with a subtractive process.
AM also allows engineers to design parts around performance requirements rather than around what a cutting tool can physically reach. That said, complex geometries and thin-walled sections bring their own difficulties: the substantial heat input involved in many metal AM processes can readily induce thermal stresses and distortion, which is why simulation and process control matter as much as the design itself.
Keys to Success: The 3DEXPERIENCE® Platform
By using the Dassault Systèmes 3DEXPERIENCE® platform for the Additive Manufacturing process, companies can establish a virtual twin of the machine and the behavior and parameters of the production process. The Virtual Twin Experience of the design and manufacturing processes enables the simulation and optimization of all aspects of production. With lead times shrinking and increasing needs to reduce cost, this becomes an essential capability that all aerospace companies should be adopting.
Simulating the print before it happens also helps address some of the process-related risks described above — predicting where thermal distortion is likely to occur, for instance, lets engineers adjust supports, orientation or scan strategy before committing expensive material and machine time to a build that might otherwise fail inspection.
Realizing the Value of AM
Considering the benefits from both the physical and virtual capabilities, companies can realize improvements in many areas:
- Reduction of lead times and material costs by accelerating the speed of incorporating engineering and manufacturing change.
- Maximizing ROI and “buy-to-fly” ratios on AM investments with increased accuracy and output through efficient use of machine and material.
- Life cycle time savings for structural parts manufacturers by moving away from an expensive ‘design – build – test’ approach to a ‘right-first-time’ approach.
- Printing replacement parts on demand to reduce inventory carrying costs and improve logistics and support (especially in remote locations or for military operations).
- Simplifying the supply chain by using 3D printing to manufacture end-use parts in-house and mitigating the risk of supply chain disruptions.
By integrating AM into virtual design and production, companies are achieving the digital transformation that is necessary. Not only will they benefit from reductions in the cost of material and capital expense, they also achieve the critical agility needed to reduce time to market and remain competitive in the industry.
Materials and Design Considerations
Getting a design onto the printer is only part of the challenge — the choice of material and the way a part is qualified for flight matter just as much.
Metal powder-bed printing remains the dominant process for structural aerospace parts, with titanium alloys particularly valued for their strength-to-weight ratio and temperature resistance. Powder handling, porosity control and a still-limited range of qualified high-temperature materials remain some of the main technical obstacles. Newer approaches that avoid the need for support structures during powder-bed printing are helping reduce both post-processing time and material waste.
Alongside metals, composite and carbon-fiber-reinforced materials are increasingly used for tooling and, in some cases, structural applications. The aerospace AM market currently faces a real scarcity of composite materials suitable for mainstream additive processes, which is one of the factors limiting how quickly composite AM parts move from prototype to certified flight hardware. On the sustainability side, manufacturers such as Boeing and COMAC have been exploring biodegradable, plant-fiber-reinforced composites for cabin materials — an example of AM-adjacent material innovation feeding back into aerospace design.
Every aerospace design also comes with non-negotiable requirements around tolerances, material characteristics and mechanical performance, especially for parts that must comply with strict certification standards. Verifying that an AM process is stable and under control typically involves monitoring witness samples throughout a build — checking tensile properties, density, dimensional accuracy, visual quality and powder hardness before a part is cleared for use.
Key Challenges and Certification in Aerospace AM
Despite its momentum, AM adoption in aerospace is still shaped by a handful of persistent challenges.
- Narrow processing windows for novel material systems, which leave little margin for error during a build.
- Insufficient long-term performance data — fatigue resistance and hydrothermal aging resistance in particular — which extends and complicates airworthiness certification cycles.
- An ongoing debate over whether existing aerospace certification frameworks are adequate, or whether AM-specific standards are needed for material specifications, process qualification and non-destructive evaluation.
- Defense-specific certification and process requirements, which can differ from commercial aerospace standards and add another layer of qualification work.
Because of these constraints, most manufacturers follow a risk-based adoption path: prioritizing applications with less stringent certification requirements — tooling, non-structural parts, low-criticality spares — before expanding into mission-critical structural components once enough process and material data has been gathered.
Companies Leading Additive Manufacturing in Aerospace
A number of aerospace and defense manufacturers, along with specialized suppliers, have moved AM well past the pilot stage. Boeing, Airbus and GE Aviation have deployed AM for structural and non-structural parts across multiple aircraft programs. GKN Aerospace has been a recognized market leader in additive manufacturing and additive fabrication for around two decades. Raytheon Technologies and its Collins Aerospace division, along with Lisi Aerospace and Embraer, have also invested in AM capability across their respective supply chains. Machine and process specialists such as Renishaw and Colibrium Additive continue to push forward metal AM systems purpose-built for aerospace-grade parts.
This concentration of investment across both airframers and their supplier base is a strong signal that AM has moved from an experimental technology to a standard tool within the aerospace manufacturing toolkit — even as certification timelines mean full structural adoption remains a gradual, staged process.
The Aerospace Additive Manufacturing Market
Interest in aerospace AM continues to grow, driven by pressure to cut lead times, reduce weight and simplify increasingly fragile global supply chains. At the same time, the market still faces real constraints — most notably a shortage of composite materials qualified for mainstream AM processes, and the certification bottlenecks described above. Manufacturers that combine physical AM capability with a strong virtual, simulation-driven process — rather than treating 3D printing as a standalone machine purchase — tend to be the ones moving fastest from prototype to qualified, flying hardware.
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Frequently Asked Questions about Additive Manufacturing
General uses for additive manufacturing in aerospace include rapid prototyping and tooling, on-demand production of spare and obsolete parts, and increasingly the manufacture of structural and non-structural flight parts, propulsion components and passive RF hardware. Programs typically start with lower-risk applications like tooling and spares before extending AM to structural, flight-critical components as certification data accumulates.
The clearest benefits are weight reduction (and the resulting fuel savings), shorter lead times between a design change and a usable part, lower inventory and logistics costs through on-demand printing, and a simplified supply chain since a single printed component can replace several traditionally manufactured subcomponents.
The main obstacles are narrow processing windows for new materials, limited long-term fatigue and durability data, an unsettled debate over whether current certification frameworks are sufficient for AM-specific processes, and a continuing shortage of composite materials qualified for mainstream additive manufacturing.
Boeing, Airbus, GE Aviation, GKN Aerospace, Raytheon Technologies (including Collins Aerospace), Lisi Aerospace and Embraer are among the manufacturers with established AM programs, alongside specialized equipment and process providers such as Renishaw and Colibrium Additive.
Titanium and other high-performance metal powders are the most established materials for structural aerospace AM, valued for their strength-to-weight ratio. Composite and carbon-fiber materials are gaining ground for tooling and select structural applications, though the market still faces a shortage of composite feedstocks fully qualified for mainstream AM processes.
Traditional machining removes material from a solid block to reach a final shape, while additive manufacturing builds a part layer by layer from a digital model. This lets AM create geometries — internal lattices, integrated channels, functionally graded surfaces — that would be impossible or prohibitively expensive to machine conventionally, though it introduces its own constraints around thermal distortion, surface finish and material qualification.
To learn more about DELMIA’s additive manufacturing solutions for aerospace, contact our experts or explore DELMIA Additive Manufacturing.
Adrian Wood has been the Director of Strategic Business Development for the DELMIA brand at Dassault Systèmes since 2019. He is responsible for developing new and innovative business markets and reinforcing the company position as an innovative leader in key industries.