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3D printing, also called additive manufacturing (AM), today is one of the very most exciting production systems. Actually, with the development of 3D printing technology, people have a strong interest in 3D printing.
Remarkably, the technology has been around for more than 30 years. The first wave of public excitement, however, came around 2012, when the media promoted the technology and set the stage for a complete change in the entire manufacturing landscape. Additive manufacturing made great progress 30 years ago, but it was not ready for large-scale promotion. Fortunately, this technology has developed rapidly in the past five years, especially in the field of metal alloy 3D printing.
The goal of this guide is to help production leaders and engineers discover new and more exciting technologies and how best to use them. The potential benefits of AM cannot be ignored: previously impossible design options, create on demand, restructure supply chains, and faster product development cycles. For example, AM can generate internal Chambers, nonlinear cooling channels, and other complex geometric shapes. Multiple components can be mixed into one design to reduce the true amount of parts that require to be designed, created, monitored, and stored.
The popularity of 3D printing is directly related to the exciting possibilities and benefits of the technology. When using 3D printing to create metal parts, the layer-by-layer method allows you to create parts without using molds or castings. Typically, the time required to make molds for different conventional manufacturing processes can vary from weeks to months without producing any parts. Machining parts can be done faster, but can be expensive for complex geometry and difficult to scale at large.
In conclusion, the four main advantages of metal 3D printing include: lower cost, rapid innovation, new design possibilities and on demand manufacturing.
3D printing greatly reduces the cost of making complex parts or customized parts. By eliminating the need for molds or tools, you can save on the investment needed to get the production line up and running. There are also waste reduction considerations. Compared with 3D printing, the economics of CNC are very different. Traditional "subtraction" processes can result in more than 95% of the material being wasted. Metal 3D printing is usually less than 1%.
The layer-by-layer approach of metal 3D printers creates design and customization opportunities that were never possible before by breaking the constraints of traditional manufacturing. Lightweight and part incorporation are two of the most popular design applications for metal 3D printers. Improvements in end-use products have been well documented in many industries, generally leading to increasingly poor weight to strength ratios and fuel efficiency.
Engineers and product designers can quickly interpolate part designs to test new ideas and concepts. The increased pace of innovation has allowed companies to bring new products to market more slowly than ever before. In recent years, this group of advantages is the most critical to improve the utilization rate of metal additive production. It is very difficult for a company to see the impact of being able to power and develop iterations cheaply.
With 3D printers, only the required number of products can be purchased and the turnaround time is short. In recent years, several major industrial companies have made meaningful investments in promoting their capacity to produce on-demand metal additives. Such promises will only accelerate the trend towards making parts as needed in the coming years. The concept of digital inventory is that part files are stored electronically and then set up according to requirements. This includes older parts that are difficult to use tools or expensive.
It is important for 3D printing enthusiasts to lower their expectations of metal AM gaining market share throughout the production process. There are still significant barriers to the feasibility of this technology in mass production of simple parts. However, these obstacles are becoming less and less every day. In recent years, we have seen some developments that combine the best that AM has to offer with traditional approaches. AM's path forward will be filled with unexpected, creative applications. That said, the long-term trend is clear. It is already reshaping manufacturing -- only slightly more subtly than predicted in 2012.
