Without a question, 3D printing has experienced incredible growth over the past few years. Serval businesses are progressing toward industrialization, and as a result, more modern technology is advancing and integrating into the larger manufacturing environment. What’s the Future of 3D Printing
In the modern world, 3D printing technology is used to create physical objects or things with specific functions, ranging from artificial human organs to architectural models. The manufacturing industry is constantly evolving and changing, and 3D printing services could be the next big thing.
According to several reports, 3D printing technology is the next major advancement in industrial manufacturing. Two-thirds of producers are now using 3D printing in some capacity, and 27 percent aim to do so in the future, according to experts. Industries’ most recent justifications for employing 3D printing include product invention, prototype, and improvement.
3D printing technology will become the main technology for rapid manufacturing
Each & every day, companies are finding new paths to incorporate advanced technology into their manufacturing, with applications of some end-use materials & ranging from tooling to spare as well as replacement parts. 3D printing technology can give an easy solution.
In terms of getting the benefits 3D printing provides for production, from automotive to customer goods, corporations across industries are becoming aware.
The wide automotive industries are already manufacturing 3D-printed parts for their vehicles. According to many reports, 55% of industries are actively using 3D printing for production.
The step for both the advanced technology and the company will be to maintain this process which works towards activating more applications on a wide scale.
For the last few years, the latest technologies have been brought to market, and besides that, a number have already been announced for the years ahead.
3D printing design developed software that will become more integrated and simpler to utilize
Designing a mass production is a challenging process, not least because it can be complicated for engineers that have been trained to design for traditional production. Only 3D printing technology can beat this boundary.
Thereafter complicating this is CAD (Computer-Aided Design) software much of which until currently hasn’t been optimized for the design requirements of 3D printing.
It can be not easy to use traditional methods to design elements made with graded materials, on the other side 3D printing technology creates well structures or model porosity. That’s the reason why people should consider 3D printing technology. Switching between different free CAD software and those paid solutions is a highly efficient method.
Many companies are beginning to analyse ways to make it easy for engineers or designers to make their designs for good manufacturing. The 3D-printed part offers all in one package. 3D printing technology provides designing software to enable design and print preparation in one environment.
Finally, making integrated 3D printing software can be an effective solution and will be a crucial piece to the technology of taking it into the mainstream. Some 3D printing software tools help professionals to design various parts better for a given process.
Concentrating on education will permit more 3D printing adoption and applications
So many things have been stated about the requirement for more instruction within the 3D public Singh industry. The latest condition of the sector survey discovered a lack of tuition as being the greatest difficulty faced by facility bureaus these days.
While learning 3D publishing for prototyping is comparatively straightforward, setting up 3D publishing for manufacturing. Investments are required in hardware, but businesses must also put their time to create the expertise this industry demands.
Lack of skills in specific can generate a lot of hotels to enter. For one, in the absence of proper education about additive production, institutions will likely suffer to create a business study or utilise cases for three-dimensional printing.
Dual Extruder 3D Printers will become more advanced
As any gardener knows, soil is essential for growing healthy plants. Not only does it provide nutrients and support for roots, but it also helps to dual extruder 3D printers. In terms of the future of 3D printing, this technology will continue to develop and advance.
Currently, there are dual extruder 3D printers that can print in multiple colors and materials. In the future, we will likely see even more advances in dual extruder 3D printers, such as the ability to print in multiple colors and materials simultaneously. This would greatly speed up the production process and allow for more complex designs to be created.
As dual extruder 3D printers become more advanced, they will become an increasingly popular tool for manufacturing and prototyping.
Dental will take on 3D publishing as a dominant manufacturing technology
Three-dimensional publishing is already having a humongous role in the dentistry sector generating surgical guides crowns and the vast majority of the aligner moulds for dental clinics. But the mechanism can become a dominating process in this industry.
A study by the smartest technicians around the globe scrutinises and shows that 3D publisher sales in the dental sector will cover the sales of tools and hardware parts by the year 2025. And on top of that, the mechanism will become the dominating manufacturing formula for dental devices and restorations around the globe by the year 2027.
Driving this prototype transformation is the development of 3D publishing based on resin technologies such as DLP, SLA, and materialistic jetting. The technology of 3D publishing based on resin can generate personalized dental equipment with wonderful surface types and premium features focused on a rapid speed.
The dental sector can advance from these abilities as the dental care providers can offer facilities cheaper and faster.
3D publishing will become more intelligent
Making 3D publishing more productive and efficient is an ongoing pursuit within the sector. One trend allowing this is the progression of more intelligent processes supported by machine and sensor learning.
3D publisher creators are starting to fit their method with sensors to permit in-process monitoring. Cameras and sensors installed inside any 3D publisher can be utilised to measure a lot of aspects of creation in real-time, assisting to record the process of construction and make certain requirements are fulfilled.
For instance, in the presence of a powder bed, metallic 3D publishing cameras and sensors can capture the temperature and size of the melt pool. Which directly influences the surface finish material properties, microstructure, and the overall performance of the parts.
Integrating technical learning methods with such sensors and cameras can assist in generating 3D publishing in a much more intelligent process. Sensors and cameras can collect valuable details installed in a digital learning system.
1. Scalability from Rapid Prototyping to Production
3D printing use for jigs, fixtures and tooling, bridge production and production parts have grown remarkably over the last few years. In that time, the heavy equipment and industrial machines industries have seen the highest adoption of use cases for jigs, fixtures and tooling; healthcare has been the biggest adopter of bridge production; and the orthopedics and industrial machines industries have seen the highest adoption rates in using 3D printing for production parts. 77%
of participants in the heavy equipment and industrial machines industries say they use additive manufacturing for jigs, fixtures and tools.
Additive manufacturing benefits every step of the product development process, enabling easy scalability in rapid prototyping to full-scale manufacturing. After all, prototyping without an eye for full-scale production misses a key tenant of what additive stands to deliver: more efficient lifecycle management.
When volumes are still relatively low – if a brand is looking to print 100 parts for testing or regional-market testing – additive manufacturing enables a team to iterate on designs and features free of charge. Even quadrupling that number can be done with no added retooling costs using 3D printing.
Additive remains the perfect fit for low- to mid-volume production where high tooling costs and high fixed costs can deter market entry. With the right level of planning, engineering and material development, 3D-printed parts can seamlessly transition into rate production equipment, such as injection molding.
Producing a part on-demand enables manufacturers to produce 3D printed parts as needed instead of pulling the part from a supply warehouse. On-demand production leads to measurable reductions in inventory and storage costs. In the automotive industry, spare parts inventory can be reduced by 90% with 3D printing, according to a report from MIT.
In shipbuilding, transitioning the production of certain parts from traditional methods to additive has proven to deliver attractive returns. For a metal part that averaged a 12-week turnaround and an average cost of $20,000 using traditional methods, using 3D printing to produce the same part decreased production time to less than 72 hours at a cost of $1,250, according to research from Gdynia Maritime University in Poland. 94%
approximate production cost-savings with additive manufacturing for a metal part that averaged a 12-week turnaround and an average cost of $20,000 using traditional methods
Today, we’re moving from a capability conversation to capacity conversation. In the future, 3D printing application opportunities will be increasingly integrated into all facets of new product introduction (NPI) where scaling volume to achieve price points will become decreasingly important.
2. Making the Supply Chain More Resilient Through Digitization
If the global pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that global supply chains can be unpredictable. Historically, supply chain management has focused on cost and efficiencies at the expense of resiliency. It’s no wonder that many supply chains failed when faced with a disruption as big as the pandemic—COVID-19’s supply chain impact was felt across every industry, but especially in healthcare and medical devices. Now, building supply chain resilience is a key objective across industries.
When a shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE) and ventilator parts was crippling the healthcare supply chain, additive manufacturing was a big part of the solution. Faced with pandemic-related obstacles, Superfeet, an insole manufacturer, dedicated available capacity to producing face shields. With 3D printing serving as their main manufacturing method, converting their lines to produce shields was done quickly with little switching cost.
In addition to supporting the production of face shields and masks, 3D printing led to innovations in ventilator parts that helped save lives. For example, Jabil supported the rapid development of ventilator splitters that allowed one ventilator to be used for several patients at once. With additive manufacturing, we were able to produce more than 60,000 splitters in just three weeks with the requisite level of quality to ensure positive patient outcomes.
It’s no surprise that additive manufacturing is a leading factor in digital transformation. It’s one of the purest digital technologies because it doesn’t require tooling and fixturing, thereby reducing or eliminating switching costs in moving production between different printers and locations. That’s a radical departure from labor-intensive methods employed by the manufacturing industry over the last 150 years where aggregation of high volume at a single site was required to achieve cost targets, especially in the highly price-sensitive consumer product markets.
In fact, the most disruptive aspect of additive has little to do with the actual printers—it’s the conversion of a digital form into a physical good, meaning a file that has a representation of the final product as opposed to a design that may compromise “product intent” to adhere to the traditional manufacturing process. 3D printing is the first step on the digital transformation journey.
Rather than stocking a warehouse full of components that might become obsolete and mass quantities of spare parts that may or may not be in demand, additive manufacturing condenses the piles of boxes eating up physical space into digital files that can be stored in the Cloud and easily accessed when needed.
In addition to digital inventories, the ability to distribute manufacturing is also changing how companies are incorporating the 3D printing process into their product strategies. Instead of solely considering a centralized solution given historically prevalent economic paradigms, distributed manufacturing enables companies to decentralize production so they can manufacture the final product closer to the customer. For example, the Jabil Additive Manufacturing Network fuels a growing 3D printer network and additive manufacturing capabilities to move manufacturing workloads to the most ideal geographic markets with speed and agility to deliver the lowest landed costs at lot sizes appropriate for the product and market.
With 3D printing, manufacturers can better connect the physical supply chain with a digital thread and manage products more efficiently from concept to end-of-life. Manufacturing can be distributed to any location that has digital manufacturing systems in place simply by putting a file on the wire. This decentralization increases transparency and collaboration. If another global event like a pandemic causes gridlock in the supply chain, additive manufacturing will be increasingly positioned to react, enabling companies to move forward more seamlessly than with a strict reliance on traditional manufacturing.
The future of additive manufacturing entails a hybrid version of manufacturing that includes a reduced number of large mega-factories, with smaller sites including more digital technologies, such as 3D printing, gaining prominence. It is also expected that printers will more commonly be deployed in non-traditional locations, like service and support centers, distribution centers or even in people’s homes to attend to the “Last Mile” of product distribution.
3D printing will eventually become simple enough that most households will be able to purchase brand files and print a product with just a few clicks, like 2D printing at Kinko’s a mere decade ago. We’re already on this course, and we’re just beginning to distribute closer to consumption delivering the levels of agility consumers have come to expect from other marketplace disruptions created by companies such as Google and Amazon around information and shopping.
3. Offering Greater Flexibility and More Customized Designs
A prevailing consumer trend transforming numerous industries is the desire for customized products. Rather than purchasing an item that was made through mass production, customers are more frequently wanting a product that is created for them specifically, gratifying their personal tastes and preferences.
Personalization and customization can be easily enabled with the low-volume production capabilities offered by additive manufacturing. 3D printing gives brands more flexibility in responsive design, specifically through design for additive manufacturing. Instead of making advanced market predictions and then spraying large quantities of identical objects into the market, manufacturers can afford to produce smaller batches, allowing designers and engineers to adjust product designs and innovate in a cost-effective manner as inspiration strikes, consumer sentiment is known, or customer feedback trickles in.
The accessibility of 3D printing is starting to reach the point where you wonder, “what can’t we print?” And when we start to dissect everything down to the molecular level, it’s just a matter of time before individual consumers can print food or frames for their glasses or… well, anything. In the future, 3D printing and future permutations of digital production will more fully empower consumers.
4. The Future of Digital is all about Materials
While increasing investments in the additive manufacturing ecosystem are fueling growth, I don’t think you can overstate the significance of the materials. Outside of the high cost of the equipment, the next big barrier is materials and closed additive manufacturing ecosystems, which have stymied the 3D printing industry’s growth. Numerous types of 3D printing materials are on the market today, but few are advanced enough to meet the quality or regulatory requirements of industries. 54%
say issues with materials prevent their company from using more additive manufacturing in production
With current challenges surrounding volumes in most industries, suppliers and manufacturers aren’t incentivized to create the different materials necessary for new applications. However, the future of 3D printing is in materials—specifically engineered and application specific materials. The different needs of diverse industries all require custom solutions to their problems. Integrating new engineered materials will transform a new generation of applications, including heavily regulated industries.
The markets will reward companies that compress the process and timeline associated with introducing 3D printing materials tailored to specific manufacturing and engineering requirements. By establishing the processes to accelerate the development and release of materials into the additive markets in a cost-effective manner, a greater number of 3D printing applications will be served and the overall digital manufacturing flywheel will begin to spin.
JABIL ENGINEERED MATERIALS
5. Creating a More Sustainable Future with 3D Printing
Finally, two of the key tenets to additive manufacturing are sustainability and conservation. One of the intrinsic benefits is that scrap material is reduced, if not eliminated. As Simon Ford and Mélanie Despeisse point out in their essay, “Additive Manufacturing and Sustainability: An Exploratory Study of the Advantages and Challenges,” additive manufacturing mimics biological processes by creating objects layer by layer, rather than produce a hulking item that must be whittled and chunks carved out to achieve the desired shape. “It is inherently less wasteful than traditional subtractive methods of production and holds the potential to decouple social and economic value creation from the environmental impact of business activities,” they write.
Aside from reducing waste, 3D printing also conserves energy. The Metal Powder Industries Federation did a study that listed 17 steps required to produce a truck gear using subtractive manufacturing versus the six steps to manufacture the same product with additive manufacturing. With 3D printing, the same product took less than half the energy. Additionally, by bringing products closer to the customer, 3D printing reduces the need for transporting products and materials, thereby positively affecting the quantity of carbon poured into the atmosphere. Therefore, we can already see that digital and additive strategies are already leading to a more sustainable future.
This is a pivotal time for the manufacturing industry. We’re standing at an epicenter where our ideas, designs and products can be nearly fully represented in the digital space and we can increasingly convert those representations into physical products using sound production methods cost-effectively with appropriate quantities using additive. As the first truly digital production technology, additive manufacturing is demonstrating its transformative nature and has already been reshaping businesses and industries with remarkable efficiencies.
To sum it up
Businesses will need to distinguish themselves from rivals in the interim in the field of 3D publishing competitors by exhibiting their particular talents and developing a very clear value offer. In light of the mechanism’s present advancement and these experts’ expectations, 3D publishing is moving toward a bright future of intelligent and digital manufacturing.