Additive Manufacturing of Aluminium Alloys in the Aeronautical Sector – A Bibliometric Analysis

Additive Manufacturing (AM) has extended its applications in the past years to a wide range of sectors such as the biomedical, automotive and aerospace industries. Not disregarding the huge efforts that have already been done and some major achievements, AM still has a long path to walk in terms of qualification and certification when it comes to highly demanding applications such as the development of aerospace structures and turbine blades, injectors, heat exchangers and combustion chambers, among others. Technologies belonging to the powder bed fusion (PBF) family, such as the selective laser melting (SLM), also known as laser powder bed fusion (L-PBF), have proven to be strong candidates to fulfil the requirements imposed by the aeronautical industry in terms of structural integrity and performance. Aluminium alloys offer a good compromise between strength and density, being vastly chosen for applications where performance and light-weighting characteristics are needed. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the understanding of the current trends and applications in the aeronautical sector regarding the use of metals processed via L-PBF, by determining the current state-of-the-art and comparing the impact and growth of two well-known and already widely studied aluminum alloys, the AlSi10Mg and Scalmalloy. To that end, a systematic literature review and bibliometric analysis were conducted using the Scopus database and the most common keywords regarding the studied areas. The results were filtered by applying some inclusion and exclusion criteria and a bibliometric analysis was performed using Biblioshiny along with the VosViewer software to evaluate the research trends over the past years.