Integration of Additive Manufacturing in Casting: Advances, Challenges, and Prospects

Abstract

Additive manufacturing (AM) is a novel manufacturing technology that can create highly customized products with more complex geometries than traditional techniques. Despite its significant advantages, including the freedom of design, mass customization, and ability to produce complex structures, AM consumes a large amount of energy and incurs high costs. In addition, AM suffers from long production cycles and low production efficiency in the large-scale manufacturing of metal structures. This study offers a review of the existing literature focused on metal AM technology. To avoid the shortcomings of AM and highlight its benefits, which are widely used for manufacturing in combination with casting. The current combination application of AM and casting is reviewed to provide solutions to the problem of manufacturing large metal components from the perspective of the use of different AM technology and quality control in casting. However, such integration is insufficient for producing large castings with complex shapes, structures, or multiple features. Therefore, a novel method for integrating AM into casting to enable the manufacture of large scale metal parts with complex shapes is introduced as a topic for possible future research. This method divides complex castings with multiple features into an AM processing part and the casting substrate. The complex features were processed by AM on the fabricated casting substrate. This study provides a review of the application of AM into casting and presents a novel idea for the integration application of AM and other processes. This promising method has significant value for future study.