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How 3D-Printed Metal Parts Are Rewriting Aerospace Certification Rules

How 3D-Printed Metal Parts Are Rewriting Aerospace Certification Rules For decades, aerospace certification rested on a simple foundation: materials made by...

imtiaz 3 min read · 2 days ago

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How 3D-Printed Metal Parts Are Rewriting Aerospace Certification Rules

For decades, aerospace certification rested on a simple foundation: materials made by forging, casting, or machining had predictable properties.

Engineers could rely on extensive databases of tensile strength, fatigue life, and crack-growth rates. A part was certified once the material, process, and design were proven through rigorous testing. Additive manufacturing of metals has broken that model.

Metal 3D printing—primarily laser powder-bed fusion and electron-beam melting—builds components layer by layer from fine powder. The resulting parts can be lighter, more complex, and produced faster than traditional equivalents.

GE Aviation’s fuel nozzles for the LEAP engine, now flying on thousands of aircraft, reduced 20 separate pieces into a single printed component and cut weight by 25 percent. Similar successes appear in rocket engines, turbine blades, and structural brackets. Yet the same process that enables these gains creates new certification headaches.