PSI - Issue 79

Suzana Lampreia et al. / Procedia Structural Integrity 79 (2026) 81–87

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of building systems, reduce parts or spare parts fabrication and be more sustainable, because the waste results are reduced relatively to subtractive manufacturing where objects are obtained on demand. (Agawala, 2025)(Coruzzolo et al., 2022) Spare part management on board ships, and especially in old ships, is critical on equipment´s maintenance. In a maritime context, ships often operate in isolated and harsh environments, where logistics on port may be subject to delays, or customs service’s reasons, or just because it is in a mission at sea. This can result in assets downtime, increased costs, and elevated risk to safety and operations. Addictive manufacturing, especially with metal 3D printing, offers on-demand spare part production that can be deployed at sea or in port, or for military ship on a Naval Base workshop. This technology may reduce lead-times and dependence on global logistics networks. A expeditious research on Google Scholar for items such as Maintenance (M), Maintenance on Ships (MS), Addictive Manufacturing (AM), Addictive Manufacturing on Ships (AMS), Addictive Manufacturing for Equipment’s Spare Parts (AMESP), 3D Manufacturing (3D-M), 3D Manufacturing on Ships (3D-MS) and 3D Manufacturing for Equipment’s Spare Parts (3D-MESP) result on a significative number of published articles, Fig. 1.

Fig. 1. Results of research on the present study.

Recent modelling studies in the marine sector demonstrate that integrating addictive manufacturing into spare-part supply chains may reduce delivery time and cost for both high and low value components. Furthermore, addictive manufacturing facilitates decentralized or hybrid supply chain configuration, which can decrease inventory requirements and mitigates supply-chain fragility. (Alzahami, 2025) Nowadays USA Navy implemented aboard warships addictive manufacturing systems to produce functional parts at sea, enhancing maintenance autonomy (Barnabas, 2025). An Australian shipbuilder introduced the largest 3D printer in the US to quickly fabricate mission critical parts, where for example reduced eight months on awaiting time for a fortnight (Jones, 2025). In the present paper will be reviewed the current addictive manufacturing technologies suitable for ship maritime maintenance, particularly metal 3D printing methods, referring the possible occurrence of defects in manufactured spare parts, and presents a SWOT analysis for implementation in maritime electro pumps systems. 2. 3D printers on equipment maintenance In the area of spare parts nowadays we have available 3D printers that enhance autonomous capacity and rapid responses to some anomaly on equipment´s (Sledgers et al, 2023). Even if it is resolved for a short-limited time, for a ship on sea, it may mean it can navigate safely to a shore and make a permanent repair restoring ship full performance. AM may be applied on maritime assets enhancing ships and other maritime infrastructure autonomy and resilience (Kostiti and Nikitakos, 2018).