# Additive Manufacturing and Chemical Engineering: Looking for Synergies from a Bibliometric Study
## 1 Introduction
Table 1 summarizes the major technologies and feedstock materials used in the seven categories of the ISO/ASTM 52900 standard. Chemicals are the building blocks of today's technological society, and maintaining this lifestyle would be impossible without them. Chemical engineering is the discipline concerned with the design, manufacture, operation, and maintenance of instruments, equipment, and chemical processing plants. It combines the principles of sciences such as chemistry, physics, mathematics, materials science, and biology with economics to efficiently design, produce, transform, transport, and use chemicals. Chemical engineering faces various challenges that require continuous evolution through rapid and innovative adaptation to shorter life cycles with sustainability in mind [10]. Additive manufacturing is expected to lead to a revolution in reaction and separation processes, drastically impacting chemical engineering as it can facilitate the development of advanced materials and sophisticated devices for various applications [11]. In addition, chemical engineering can \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{l l} \hline \hline
**Additive Manufacture Processes** & **Feed Material** \\ \hline Material Extrusion & \\ (MEX) & Thermoplastic filaments and pellets, paste-like materials, and liquids in syringes \\ Vat Polymerization & Liquid photo-curable resins \\ (VP) & Material Jetting \\ (M) & Polymers and wax-like materials (fillers are optional) \\ Sheet Lamination & Paper, polymer, and metal sheets \\ Powder Bed Fusion & Polymer, metal, ceramic, and sand powders \\ (PBF) & Direct Energy Deposition \\ (DED) & Metal wires and powders and ceramic powders \\ Binder Jetting & Polymer, metal, ceramic, glass, and sand powders \\ (BJ) & \\ \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 1: Main feed materials of the different additive manufacture processes. Figure 1: Scheme of the classification of the main additive manufacturing processes. provide methods to assess the sustainability of additive manufacturing processes, taking into account environmental, social, and economic aspects [12]. Thus, the integration of additive manufacturing and chemical engineering can provide benefits such as design freedom, time and material savings, product customization, and function integration, but it can also present relevant challenges such as material selection and processing, component quality and reproducibility, device stability and compatibility, and product and process sustainability assessment. Despite the importance and potential of the synergies between additive manufacturing and chemical engineering, there is a lack of studies that systematically and thoroughly analyze the mutual contributions of chemical engineering and additive manufacturing, both quantitatively and qualitatively [13]. Therefore, it is necessary to conduct a bibliometric review and network analysis of the scientific literature published on the state-of-the-art contributions of chemical engineering and additive manufacturing to obtain a more comprehensive and detailed overview of the research in this area. Bibliometric review is a technique that allows the quantitative analysis of scientific production using objective indicators, while network analysis is a technique that allows the graphical representation and qualitative study of interactions between elements of a system using concepts such as nodes, links, and clusters [14; 15]. These two techniques are complementary and allow a broader and deeper understanding of scientific research in a field, as well as the identification of trends, patterns, innovations, leaders, collaborators, competitors, niches, and opportunities. The purpose of this work was to analyze, from a bibliometric perspective, the scientific literature published in Scopus related to the synergies between additive manufacturing and chemical engineering.