Additive Manufacturing (AM) is the forefront of advanced manufacturing technologies and has the potential to revolutionize manufacturing, with a dramatic change in the design and project paradigms. A comprehensive review of existent metal AM processes, processable materials, respective defects and inspection methods (destructive and non-destructive) is presented in a succinct manner. Particularly, the AM design optimization methodologies are reviewed and their threats and constraints discussed. Finally, an aerospace industry case study is presented and several cost-effective examples are enumerated.

This paper focuses on the development of a new class of eight‐node solid finite elements, suitable for the treatment of volumetric and transverse shear locking problems. Doing so, the proposed elements can be used efficiently for 3D and thin shell applications. The starting point of the work relies on the analysis of the subspace of incompressible deformations associated with the standard (displacement‐based) fully integrated and reduced integrated hexahedral elements. Prediction capabilities for both formulations are defined related to nearly‐incompressible problems and an enhanced strain approach is developed to improve the performance of the earlier formulation in this case. With the insight into volumetric locking gained and benefiting from a recently proposed enhanced transverse shear strain procedure for shell applications, a new element conjugating both the capabilities of efficient solid and shell formulations is obtained. Numerical results attest the robustness and efficiency of the proposed approach, when compared to solid and shell elements well‐established in the literature.