Accelerating Australia’s Aerospace & Defense Industries with Additive Manufacturing
Like the US Manufacturing market, the Australian manufacturing landscape has seen companies and capabilities offshore for decades. Now, due to global issues, both countries are rapidly looking to regrow their domestic production—specifically around aerospace and defense. However, the Australian market can learn from its antipodal neighbors about what works and what doesn’t.
In the last dozen years, design was the easy part. Our ability to design and simulate high performing parts, in theory, outstripped our ability to make them. This left engineers with a growing bubble of innovation that was not producible. Additive Manufacturing (AM) has for decades promised to unlock this wealth of innovation. But until recently, the technology was too immature to significantly impact industry.
The purpose is not to go back to the same manufacturing solutions that existed in the past but to leapfrog ahead. The US has seen amazing growth in technical velocity over the past few years by adopting the most advanced manufacturing solution. Companies like SpaceX, Launcher, Aerojet Rocketdyne, Astra, Honeywell, Lockheed Martin, Siemens Energy, and more trust the Velo3D end-to-end metal AM solution to produce the most complex designs. Using Velo3D, ideas that were previously trapped on paper are now regularly being produced in volume.
