3D Printing

 3D Printing

From decreasing costs to increasing efficiency to spurring innovation, lots of people are excited about the impact that 3D Printing will have on the future of manufacturing. However, the reality is, it has made a considerable impact on the business.

What is 3D Printing?

3D printing or additive manufacturing is a process of making three dimensional solid objects from a digital file. The creation of a 3D printed object achieves using additive processes. In an additive process, an object is created by laying down successive layers of material until the purpose creates. Each of these layers can see as a thinly sliced horizontal cross-section of the eventual object.

Please take a look back at the evolution of 3D Printing to see how the phenomenon started and how it has helped the manufacturing industry evolve.

The 1980s: Foundations Of 3D Printing

3D Printing was only an idea in the 1980s. In 1981, Hideo Kodama of the Nagoya Municipal Industrial Research Institute in Japan discovered a way to print layers of material to create a 3D product. Unfortunately, Kodama was unable to get his patent for the technology approved.

Since the invention of stereolithography by Charles Hull in 1984, 3D printing has gone through more than three decades of continued research and development. The hobbyist novelty printers of yesteryear producing decorative doodads with melted plastics have morphed into business tools. 3D print anything from rocket engines to functional human organs, as needed, on-demand, and at ever-plummeting costs.

It’s somewhat reminiscent of the telephone’s evolution, as it moved from a rotary dial design with shared “party” telephone lines to digital, portable and eventually cellular phones. But just as cellular was simply the beginning for today’s ubiquitous smartphones, single-material 3D printers creating simple devices certainly won’t be the end of the line for 3D printers.

Instead, these evolutionary steps in 3D Printing have helped show what’s been missing in the world of additive manufacturing.

The timeline below illustrates the evolution that is bringing additive manufacturing technology from hobbyist tool to “factory-in-a-box.”

Two other vital technologies were patented during this period as well –

(i)Selective Laser Sintering (SLS), which uses powder grains to form 3D printed products,

(ii)Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM), which uses heat to layer 3D models. These 3D printing models set the foundation for 3D Printing.

The 1990s: More Technologies And More Adoption

With the foundation of the technology already created, companies began experimenting, expanding, and, ultimately, commercializing 3D Printing.

1994: Solidscape launched ModelMaker, the first 3D wax printer.

1997: AeroMat launched the first 3D metal printer using Laser Additive Manufacturing (LAM).

1995: The Fraunhofer Institute ILT, Aachen, invented the selective laser melting process. The process, which yields precise and mechanically secure outputs, given the use of metal alloys, and can handle nested and intricate geometries. Consists of the melting, layer by layer, of metal powder using a laser beam. Selective laser sintering is a similar process, whereby metal powder is not completely fused. Hence does not form as much of a coherent and homogeneous mass as an output.

1999: Objet Geometries (today Stratasys) launched the first 3D printer that can print both hard and soft materials to simulate different material properties in one object.

1999: Scientists at the Wake Forrest Institute for Regenerative Medicine printed synthetic scaffolds of a human bladder and then coated them with the cells of human patients.

New processes, such as micro casting and sprayed materials, allowed 3D Printing to use for metals, not just plastics.

However, the technology was still cost-prohibitive. As a result, adoption limited to high-cost, low-volume product production. Thus, it became a natural fit for prototyping new products in the aerospace, automotive, and medical industries.

The 2000s: 3D Printing Explodes

While there were iterative changes and innovations related to 3D Printing throughout the early 2000s, 2005 marked the year that 3D Printing went on the path to becoming more mainstream. Many of the first patents began to expire, and inventors and entrepreneurs sought to take advantage.

2005: The beginning of the Maker Revolution, where people began creating new products on their own, using open-source hardware. The Fab Home project was one of the first open-source DIY printing projects.

2006: The first SLS machine became commercially viable, opening the door to on-demand manufacturing of industrial parts.

2007:

Object introduced the Connex series of 3D printers that allowed users to combine two different materials in a single print job in a variety of combinations. Produce 14 different levels of hardness, texture, and shading in one object.

2008:

A professor in England named Dr. Adrian Bowyer made it his mission to create a low-cost 3D printer. By 2008, his “Darwin” printer had successfully 3D printed over 18% of its components, and the device cost less than $650.RepRap Project, an open-source initiative, released Darwin, the first open-sourced 3D printer hardware. This attracted a vast 3D-printing maker community worldwide. At the time, Shape ways started its online 3D printing service, a 3D-printing marketplace where designers could get feedback from consumers and then fabricate their products. MakerBot was also created in this year and provided open-source DIY kits for people to build their 3D printers and products.

When the FDM patent fell to the public domain in 2009, more companies were able to create a variety of 3D printers, and the technology became more accessible.

3D Printing began making mainstream headlines, as concepts such as 3D printed limbs and 3D printed kidneys were fascinating and potentially compelling.

The 2010s And the Maker Movement

As the cost of 3D printers continued to decline, the demand for technology began to soar, and they became more commonplace in the home and businesses.

On the shop floor, manufacturers began leveraging 3D Printing in a variety of ways. Machine parts could repair quickly, and inventory shortages could combat with ease.

2011:

The opportunities offered by 3D printing techniques as production rather than simple prototyping tools were made even more evident by the Southampton University Laser Sintered Aircraft (SULSA). An uncrewed aircraft whose structure printed, from the wings to the integral control surfaces by a laser sintering machine, with a resolution of 100 micrometers per layer. The uncrewed aerial vehicle (UAV) could be assembled without tools, using ‘snap fit’ techniques.

2014: Airbus Operation GmbH filed a patent for 3D Printing an entire airplane structure. The method is unusual also due to the 4D-printing-like features: a study on materials deformation, especially concerning each other, is used to further strengthen the structure, by exploiting the resulting forces. The industry generated more than $1 billion in revenue. But along with the impressive financial impact of the technology, 3D printing also made an impact on how people work.

2017: Nano Dimension’s DragonFly Pro is the first entry into this new category of advanced additive manufacturing for electronics. The DragonFLy Pro is an exact inkjet deposition system that allows for simultaneous 3D Printing of silver nanoparticle ink (metal) and insulating ink (dielectric polymer). This process sets new standards for accuracy, complexity, and speed in the fields of both 3D printed electronics and professional electronics development.

With additive manufacturing for printed electronics, it is possible to produce prototypes and custom parts in a fraction of the time required by traditional subtractive manufacturing. Upon completion of a 3D print job, there is also no need for post-processing. Product development teams can now design and build fully functional, free-form electronics that were unimaginable previously.

People were now free to make and create new products on their own without relying on companies or technology firms. This empowering shift is fueling The Maker Revolution, which values creation and focuses on open-source hardware.

The Future Of 3D Printing

3D printing

The 3D printing industry keeps on growing, so what should we expect in the future? According to a recent analysis by A.T. Kearney, 3D printing will experience a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 14.37 percent to nearly $17.2 billion between now and 2020. That means 3D printers will be found in your own home as well as in the classroom.

Another recent study determined that 6.7 million 3D printers will be shipped globally by 2020 – 14 times more than in 2016. As new technologies improve the uses of 3D printers, the technology will continue to disrupt the manufacturing industry and bring it to greater heights.

Three Random, Cool, Unexpected Facts About 3D Printing

• NASA is a major proponent of 3D Printing—from food to the first zero-gravity 3D printer in space.
• There’s a 3D printer on the market (the Photonic Professional GT) that can create objects no wider than a human hair.
• Louis DeRosa used a 3Doodler—the 3D-printing pen made famous by netting $2.3 million on Kickstarter—to create a working hexacopter-framed drone.

Conclusions

While additive manufacturing has been around in its main techniques already for some 40+ years now, and cannot be considered an immature technology. It is still undergoing a significant innovation process, often through the hybridization of established base-techniques. Furthermore, in its use—especially within the AEC field—its disruptive potential has yet to be exploited and harvested outside the experimental research or pilot projects.

While waiting for ‘the ultimate’ technique, some limitations of additive manufacturing can deal with through a series of smart strategies. One of these consists in limiting its use to only the parts that need customization, to overcome the slower production speed still often associated with AM. It is the nodes that can embed the nonstandard, varying part of the overall geometries, thus allowing for the standardization of all other elements. In any case, as it is already the case in some fields like engineering, also within AEC. It seems that now additive manufacturing techniques can slowly be adopted not only for the rapid prototyping of models and components. Or as a support technique to other more established technologies, but also to produce functional elements within the final, built structures, or even fully functional entire structures.