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Rapid manufacturing technologies could join the industrial mainstream if a heavyweight consortium led by Loughborough University succeeds. Andrew Lee reports.

A £2.7m university/industry collaboration hopes to bring rapid manufacturing (RM) technologies into the industrial mainstream.

The partners in the project, called Atkins, have ambitious plans to apply emerging RM techniques in ways that it is claimed could 'revolutionise' component production in the automotive and aerospace sectors and bring major cost and environmental benefits.

Atkins is led by

and backed by a heavyweight industrial consortium that includes

,

,

and

. The

is also supporting Atkins, which is based at Loughborough's Wolfson School of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering.

At the heart of the project is the application of additive manufacturing processes to selective laser melting (SLM) of metallic components. SLM uses lasers to fuse powdered metal materials layer-by-layer to create complex objects. The system follows cross-sections produced from a 3D CAD model of the component, and the RM process is often likened to 'printing' a part.

These types of technologies are most commonly used in the field of rapid prototyping (RP) rather than as a widely-used manufacturing technique.

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