Lower Buy-to-Fly Ratios with Near-Net Additive Manufacturing

“We buy raw material to make it fly; the less material remains on the ground the better,” says Heinz Baehr, a member of the executive board for Aircraft Philipp Group in Übersee, Germany.

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This dichotomy between material purchased and material that ultimately ends up in flight can be expressed by a buy-to-fly ratio, in other words the ratio of material input to final part output. A high ratio means that much of the raw material that was purchased never made it to the air. Most of that material became scrap on the ground, likely cut away in a machining process. When dealing with expensive metals like titanium, those unused chips can add up to significant cost. A conventional process like milling can have a buy-to-fly ratio 10 or higher. 

To reduce scrap and improve its buy-to-fly ratio, Aircraft Philipp has implemented metal additive manufacturing (AM) to manufacture near-net-shape parts. Using a wire-arc-based AM system from Gefertec to print large parts has reduced machining time as well as material usage. As a result, the company’s buy-to-fly ratio is now close to 2 on large aerospace components. 

Read more in this report from Barbara Schulz, European correspondent for Modern Machine Shop and sister publication Additive Manufacturing. 

Additive Manufacturing Conference

Want to learn more about AM for part production? Attend the Additive Manufacturing Conference + Expo, a three-day technical conference, exhibit hall and business networking event focused on the industrial applications of additive technologies for production. Register here.