Sustainability in Aerospace Additive Manufacturing: current trends and future perspectives

Additive Manufacturing (AM) is of paramount relevance in the aerospace industry. That is due to it offering numerous benefits such as complexity of geometries, modeling, prototyping, lightweighting, reduction of material use/waste, and sustainability. From the same perspective, the so-called Smart Manufacturing is gaining great interest: it is an approach integrating cutting-edge technologies, such as AM, with data-driven methods to leverage efficiency, productivity, sustainability, and scalability of processes. It aims to create interconnected manufacturing ecosystems to improve quality, to drive innovation, and to cut costs. Nevertheless, some challenges still exist with AM and its sustainability implications. While several reviews have focused on just AM processes or sustainable aspects of AM for general applications, this one is a comprehensive overview of recent manufacturing approaches, highlighting the need for integrating Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) techniques with AM process monitoring. As a result, this review will provide insights into the current trends and future developments to help and support decision-making in the aerospace industry from a sustainable perspective.