David Hamm 3d printing has been around for many years. It is also known as additive manufacturing. It is used for things like concrete and parts or even chocalate. 3d printing is mainly used for manufacturing purposes, but is getting closer to being a part of everyday life.
According to a survey two thirds of industrial manufacturers use some kind of 3d printing.
In the world of manufactured objects, heated plastic is pushed, pulled, inflated and squeezed into tools to produce everything from bottles to cellphones. The most popular form of plastic manufacturing is injection molding. When compared to the entire cycle time of injection molding the 3D printer is quicker, but once the injection tool is finished, there’s just no contest. Cycle times for industrialised injection molding machines can be lower than a second, and if you want to produce anything at scale it’s still the only good choice.
Quality is important too because it’s no good just producing an object, it needs to be produced with integrity. Structural integrity is also weaker, the lack of an internal homogenous crystal structure means 3D printed parts are britle. 3D printed parts may be produced ‘quickly’ when compared end­to­end with injection molding, but at commercial scale they fail on almost every level.
Firstly, current 3D printers are bounded by their space envelope. The Replicator 2 can print objects of 28.5 x 15.3 x 15.5 cm. There are larger devices, but normally the space envelopes are around that of a microwave oven. Anythng larger needs to be made in pieces and connected afterwards by bonding parts or mechanical joints. Secondly, 3D printers typically produce objects from polymers. There are advances in metal 3D printing but these are pretty limited. Thirdly, products such as the Makerbot can only print one color at a time, this can be changed but a new colored filament needs to be threaded into the machine for each color break. Other printers can produce a wider variety of colors, but the color quality is pretty poor. Also, every part produced in a 3D printer has a rough surface, which needs sanding and painting if gloss is used
3D printers will get better. As we have seen there is keen interest in 3D printing, which will drive down cost and make the service more ubiquitous. For reference, there is already a
3d printer in the Skymall catalog. the quality will improve with new materials, better finishes and higher speeds. A clear parallel to this comes in the form of domestic laser printers, a technology which has improved in quality and decreased in cost at a rate which seemed impossible only years before. The 3D CAD software will become simpler and cheaper, making the original data easier to create.
In big business 3D printing is now referred to as ‘additive manufacture’ and many millions of dollars are being spent investigating the area. There are a few hindrances to a mass manufactured device which uses additive manufacture, namely time, finish, quality and material choice. 3D printing will most likely