3D printer essay

Special report: Manufacturing and innovation

Additive manufacturing

Solid print Making things with a 3D printer changes the rules of manufacturing

Apr 21st 2012 | From the print edition

INSIDE A LOW-RISE building in a business

park at Rock Hill, South Carolina, is a vision of

the factory of the future. Several dozen

machines are humming away, monitored from

a glass-fronted control room by two people

looking at computer screens. Some of the

machines are the size of a car, others that of a

microwave oven, but they all have windows

that you can peer into. One is making jewellery, others are producing the plastic grip for an

electric drill, the dashboard of a car, an intricate lampshade and a bespoke artificial leg. One

is even making parts to build more machines like itself.

This is the headquarters of 3D Systems, a firm founded by Chuck Hull, who in a 1986 patent

described a system he had invented for making three-dimensional objects as

“stereolithography”. It worked by using a beam of ultraviolet light to solidify a thin layer of

liquid plastic, a bit like ink, and repeating the process by adding more liquid plastic. Other

forms of 3D printing have since emerged (see article

(http://www.economist.com/node/21552903) ), but they all work as an additive process,

building objects up layer by layer.

3D printing was originally conceived as a way to make one-off prototypes, but as the

technology is getting better more things are being printed as finished goods (a process

known as additive manufacturing). Currently around 28% of the money spent on printing

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things is for final products, according to Terry Wohlers, who runs a research firm

specialising in the field. He predicts that this will rise to just over 50% by 2016 and to more

than 80% by 2020. But it will never reach 100%, he thinks, because the ability to make

prototypes quickly and cheaply will remain an important part of the mix.

One of a kind

One-off prototypes can be hideously expensive to produce, but a 3D printer can bring down

the cost by a huge margin. Lots of consumer goods, mechanical parts, shoes and architects'

models now appear in a 3D-printed form for appraisal by engineers, stylists and clients

before getting the go-ahead. Any changes can be swiftly reprinted in a few hours or

overnight, whereas waiting for a new prototype to emerge from a machine shop could take

weeks. Some designers are already printing ready-to-wear shoes and dresses from plastic

and nylon materials. Iris van Herpen, a Dutch fashion designer, has produced striking 3D-

printed collections for the catwalks. No one can yet print leather, but they are working on it.

As there are barely any economies of scale in additive manufacturing, the technology is

ideally suited to low-volume production. It also allows the mass customisation of finished

parts. Millions of dental crowns and shells for hearing aids are already being made

individually with 3D printers.

Freed of the constraints of traditional factories, additive manufacturing allows designers to

produce things that were previously considered far too complex to make economically. That

could be for aesthetic reasons, but engineers are finding practical applications too. For

example, fluids flow more efficiently through rounded channels than they do around sharp

corners, but it is very difficult to make such channels inside a solid metal structure by

conventional means, whereas a 3D printer can do this easily. 3T RPD, a British firm that

offers additive-manufacturing services, printed a gearbox for a racing car with smooth

internal pathways for hydraulic oil instead of drilled-out right-angle bends. The box not only

allows faster gear changes but is some 30% lighter, says Ian Halliday, the firm's chief

executive. A Boeing F-18 fighter contains a number of printed parts such as air ducts, for

similar reasons.

Weight savings are part of the attraction of 3D-printed parts. With objects being built up

layer by layer, it is possible to use just enough material to make the part work. Building

things in a traditional factory requires adding flanges and brackets so that objects can be

handled, milled and moulded by machine tools, and to provide surfaces for the parts to be

bolted or welded together. A 3D printer is likely to print the item as a complete part that

requires no assembly. It can even make mechanical objects with moving parts in one go.

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This promises big savings in material costs. In the aerospace industry metal parts are often

machined from a solid billet of costly high-grade titanium. This can mean that 90% of the

material is cut away, and the swarf is of no use for making aircraft. However, titanium

powder can be used to print things like a bracket for an aircraft door or part of a satellite.

These can be as strong as a machined part but use only 10% of the raw material, according to

researchers at EADS, the European aerospace consortium which is the parent of Airbus.

The ability to produce highly complex designs with powerful computer software and turn

them into real objects with 3D printing is creating a new design language. 3D-printed items

often have an organic, natural look. “Nature has come up with some very efficient designs,

and often it is a good idea to mimic them,” says Wim Michiels, vice-president of Materialise,

a Belgian firm that uses additive manufacturing to make a range of products, including

medical devices. By incorporating the fine, lattice-like internal structure of natural bone into

a metal implant, for instance, it can be made lighter than a machined one without any loss of

strength, integrate more easily with the patient's own bones and can be crafted precisely to

fit the intended patient. Last year surgeons in the Netherlands printed a new titanium jaw for

a woman suffering from a chronic bone infection.

Many companies are now wondering about the effect that additive manufacturing will have

on their business. Some are taking the technology very seriously; GE, for one, is exploring

how it might use 3D printing in all its operations. It already has one product in the pipeline,

in the form of a small ultrasound scanner. Such scanners are used by doctors to produce an

image of features inside the body, such as unborn babies. The size, weight and cost of the

imaging consoles has shrunk, but the transducer probe which is placed on the body has

remained largely unchanged and is now the most costly part of the system. The probe

transmits pulses of high-frequency sound and receives signals back, using the reflections to

produce images. It contains tiny piezoelectric structures that are made by painstakingly

micro-machining a brittle block of ceramic material.

Now GE has developed an additive system to print the transducer. This will greatly reduce

production costs and allow new, inexpensive portable scanners to be developed, not only for

medical use but also to inspect critical aerospace and industrial structures for cracks.

Repeat after me

How far could this technology go? Mr Idelchik, of GE Global Research, has his sights set

high: “One day we will print an engine.” But a number of manufacturers, such as GE and

Rolls-Royce, believe that some form of hybrid printing system will emerge. This would

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produce the outline of a shape, thus saving on material, which can then be machined for

precision.

The Replicator, a robotic rapid-manufacturing system made by Cybaman Technologies, a

British firm, already gets close. The size of a large refrigerator, it is capable of both

subtractive and additive manufacturing. It uses a laser-based deposition system to build a

basic shape which is finished by machining. The Replicator, as befits its name, is also capable

of reverse engineering by digitally scanning an object placed inside it to produce the data

needed to build an exact replica.

The Replicator is as near as current technology can get to the teleporter of science fiction. It

could scan an object in one place and tell another machine on the other side of the world how

to build a copy. That means, for instance, that urgently needed spares could be produced in

remote places without having to ship anything. Even parts that are no longer available could

be replicated, by scanning a broken item, repairing it virtually and then printing a new one.

The chances are, though, that digital libraries will appear online for parts and products that

are no longer available. Just as the emergence of e-books means books may never go out of

print, components could always remain available. Service mechanics could have portable 3D

printers in their vans, or hardware stores could offer part-printing services.

3D printers would also be invaluable in remote areas. Deon de Beer of Vaal University of

Technology near Johannesburg is working on a project called the Idea 2 Product Lab which

uses low-cost 3D printers for training and to spark an interest in design and manufacturing

among students. When setting up a similar lab at one of the college's satellite campuses at

Upington, a largely rural area in the Northern Cape, his team found itself short of a

particular type of flat spanner. Rather than waiting days for the correct tool to be delivered, it

printed one and completed the job.

Instead of a spanner this could have been a small plastic part, perhaps to fix a piece of

equipment in a local hospital or to repair an agricultural machine, says Mr de Beer. He

believes 3D printers could “produce a new breed of mechanical engineers”, especially in rural

regions.

Some people already have 3D printers at

home. Industrial 3D-printing systems start at

about $15,000 and go up to more than $1m,

says Mr Wohlers. But cheaper desktop

machines are creating an entirely new market

(see chart 5). This is made up of hobbyists, do-

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it-yourself enthusiasts, tinkerers, inventors,

researchers and entrepreneurs. Some 3D-

printing systems can be built from kits and use

open-source software. But big producers of 3D

printers are also entering the market.

3D Systems, which produces a variety of

prototyping and industrial machines, is now

launching a consumer range of small 3D

printers, called the Cube, which can make

things like toys, chess pieces and ornaments.

They have been developed along with an

online platform called Cubify to provide

services for a community of users. Priced at $1,299, the Cube prints by depositing a thin

layer of material from cartridges, which come in different colours. This cures as a hard

plastic. They can produce parts up to 5.5 inches (140mm) cubed at a typical cost in materials

of about $3.50. The quality is not up to that of industrial printers, but it is good enough for

many people. Higher-quality creations can be uploaded to Cubify's online printing service.

The new range is not just about printing things, says Abe Reichental, 3D Systems' chief

executive. It is also about simplifying the process of making products and letting people use

the power of the web to share ideas. “This is a personal manufacturing revolution,” he says.

From the print edition: Special report

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