Jay Clemens
Airbus Group Innovations and EOS have partnered to assess and compare environmental lifecycles of two aircraft production technologies.
The team applied the rapid investment casting and direct metal laser sintering processes to an Airbus A320 nacelle hinge bracket for overall lifecycle benchmarking, EOS said Tuesday.
Jon Meyer, additive layer manufacturing research team lead at EOS, said the DMLS process could be applied when designing and building sustainable aircraft parts in low-volume production.
Researchers first evaluated the DMLS technology with a common casting technique as the baseline and compared a steel and a titanium bracket in terms of their lifecycle.
Production through an investment casting process was then analyzed against the DMLS manufacturing technology through the EOSINT M 280 system.
The team based the benchmarking on Airbus’ streamlined lifecycle assessment and ISO 14040 series requirements data and the assessment will be used as a groundwork for further aircraft parts studies, the companies said.
