ABSTRACT
Additive manufacturing (AM) technologies build near-net shape components one layer at a time using data from 3D computer-aided design (CAD) models. The workshop focused on identifying possibilities for development in design, process modeling and control, materials, biomedical applications, energy and sustainability, education, and efforts at development in the overall AM community. For plastics, work on automated near-net-shape AM of components dates back to the 1980s. Work on metals is more, and by far the bulk of metal AM research has focused on fusion processes, where successive layers of metal are deposited by melting. Metals AM is still a relatively new and immature technology, and there is a need for understanding the basic science of each particular AM process as most of the processing parameters to this point have been empirically derived. Researchers and industry leaders in the European Union have identified AM as a key emerging technology.
