by Francis Curodeau
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| 3D printed gears |
A couple of years ago, rapid prototyping technologies (for example, 3D printing) reached maturity and made their way into the market. Those computer controlled machines were created to change the way we manufacture plastic and metal parts. The many possible applications of 3D printing evolved through a very fast development. 3D printing was a technology part of the future that made people dream. Contrary to what one might think, many people thought that rapid prototyping had it's place into domestic use! And that's partly what happened. Several fanatics began to build their own machines, to the point they formed a community. On top of that, companies around the world started selling printers of all sizes and prices. For some reason, sometime ago the craze for 3D printing seemed to have decreased. At least, we talk about it much less than before. Is it because we discovered that this technology has less to offer than we originaly anticipated? Let's find out where 3D printing technologies are headed.
For the moment, the future of 3D printing is easier to anticipate than before. Some people wonder if 3D printers will one day replace plastic injection molding. Well, it is obvious that it will take a really long time. For the simple reason that you have a much higher yield of molded parts than printed parts. The key advantage of 3D printing over molding is that it is much cheapier to build prototypes, since you don't need to machine molds (the biggest expense in injection molding). Therefore, it's clear that developpers have an advantage to use 3D printing to make their first models during the prototyping phase, that's why they usually make the choice to print samples using 3D printing before they truly build it with a conventional mold.
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| Ultimaker s5 |
In the past few years, a lot of improvements were made concerning the precison and quality of printings. The variety of materials printers can work with has also exploded. Recently, metal printing have made its entry on the market. Those machines are in competition with the reliable CNC machines that have already proven themselves. But this technology also has a couple of advantages over its competitor, for example, the fact that it can produce parts with complicated shapes. Furthermore, there is less material losts using 3D printing than CNC machining because printers add material to create the part while CNCs remove material from a block. Even if the future of metal 3D printing is not assured, hundreds of millions of dollars have been raised from investors to finance a project by the company Desktop Metal, to develop metal 3D printers.
One thing is sure, we are still at the beginning of the 3D printing revolution. At the moment, we are building what later is going to become how we make things. Everyday we innovate and we discover new and useful applications of the technology. We may be attending a third industrial revolution?
Sources:
https://channels.theinnovationenterprise.com/articles/why-3d-printing-the-future-of-manufacturing
https://www.manufacturingtomorrow.com/article/2018/01/the-future-of-3d-printing/10820
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