From: Eugen Leitl <eugen@leitl.org>
Date: Mon, Feb 14, 2011 at 11:23 AM
Subject: [tt] Three-dimensional printing from digital designs will transform
manufacturing and allow more people to start making things
To: tt@postbiota.org
 
 
 
http://www.economist.com/node/18114221?story_id=18114221&CFID=162367227&CFTOKEN=74435751
 
The printed world
 
Three-dimensional printing from digital designs will transform manufacturing
and allow more people to start making things 3D printing
 
Feb 10th 2011 | FILTON | from PRINT EDITION
 
FILTON, just outside Bristol, is where Britain’s fleet of Concorde
supersonic
airliners was built. In a building near a wind tunnel on the same sprawling
site, something even more remarkable is being created. Little by little a
machine is “printing” a complex titanium landing-gear bracket, about the
size
of a shoe, which normally would have to be laboriously hewn from a solid
block of metal. Brackets are only the beginning. The researchers at Filton
have a much bigger ambition: to print the entire wing of an airliner.
 
Far-fetched as this may seem, many other people are using three-dimensional
printing technology to create similarly remarkable things. These include
medical implants, jewellery, football boots designed for individual feet,
lampshades, racing-car parts, solid-state batteries and customised mobile
phones. Some are even making mechanical devices. At the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (MIT), Peter Schmitt, a PhD student, has been
printing something that resembles the workings of a grandfather clock. It
took him a few attempts to get right, but eventually he removed the plastic
clock from a 3D printer, hung it on the wall and pulled down the
counterweight. It started ticking.
 
Engineers and designers have been using 3D printers for more than a decade,
but mostly to make prototypes quickly and cheaply before they embark on the
expensive business of tooling up a factory to produce the real thing. As 3D
printers have become more capable and able to work with a broader range of
materials, including production-grade plastics and metals, the machines are
increasingly being used to make final products too. More than 20% of the
output of 3D printers is now final products rather than prototypes,
according
to Terry Wohlers, who runs a research firm specialising in the field. He
predicts that this will rise to 50% by 2020. Related topics
 
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
 
Using 3D printers as production tools has become known in industry as
“additive” manufacturing (as opposed to the old, “subtractive” business of
cutting, drilling and bashing metal). The additive process requires less raw
material and, because software drives 3D printers, each item can be made
differently without costly retooling. The printers can also produce
ready-made objects that require less assembly and things that traditional
methods would struggle with—such as the glove pictured above, made by Within
Technologies, a London company. It can be printed in nylon, stainless steel
or titanium.
 
Click to manufacture
 
The printing of parts and products has the potential to transform
manufacturing because it lowers the costs and risks. No longer does a
producer have to make thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of items to
recover his fixed costs. In a world where economies of scale do not matter
any more, mass-manufacturing identical items may not be necessary or
appropriate, especially as 3D printing allows for a great deal of
customisation. Indeed, in the future some see consumers downloading products
as they do digital music and printing them out at home, or at a local 3D
production centre, having tweaked the designs to their own tastes. That is
probably a faraway dream. Nevertheless, a new industrial revolution may be
on
the way.
 
Printing in 3D may seem bizarre. In fact it is similar to clicking on the
print button on a computer screen and sending a digital file, say a letter,
to an inkjet printer. The difference is that the “ink” in a 3D printer is a
material which is deposited in successive, thin layers until a solid object
emerges.
 
The layers are defined by software that takes a series of digital slices
through a computer-aided design. Descriptions of the slices are then sent to
the 3D printer to construct the respective layers. They are then put
together
in a number of ways. Powder can be spread onto a tray and then solidified in
the required pattern with a squirt of a liquid binder or by sintering it
with
a laser or an electron beam. Some machines deposit filaments of molten
plastic. However it is achieved, after each layer is complete the build tray
is lowered by a fraction of a millimetre and the next layer is added. And
when you’re happy, click print
 
The researchers at Filton began using 3D printers to produce prototype parts
for wind-tunnel testing. The group is part of EADS Innovation Works, the
research arm of EADS, a European defence and aerospace group best known for
building Airbuses. Prototype parts tend to be very expensive to make as
one-offs by conventional means. Because their 3D printers could do the job
more efficiently, the researchers’ thoughts turned to manufacturing
components directly.
 
Aircraft-makers have already replaced a lot of the metal in the structure of
planes with lightweight carbon-fibre composites. But even a small airliner
still contains several tonnes of costly aerospace-grade titanium. These
parts
have usually been machined from solid billets, which can result in 90% of
the
material being cut away. This swarf is no longer of any use for making
aircraft.
 
To make the same part with additive manufacturing, EADS starts with a
titanium powder. The firm’s 3D printers spread a layer about 20-30 microns
(0.02-0.03mm) thick onto a tray where it is fused by lasers or an electron
beam. Any surplus powder can be reused. Some objects may need a little
machining to finish, but they still require only 10% of the raw material
that
would otherwise be needed. Moreover, the process uses less energy than a
conventional factory. It is sometimes faster, too.
 
There are other important benefits. Most metal and plastic parts are
designed
to be manufactured, which means they can be clunky and contain material
surplus to the part’s function but necessary for making it. This is not true
of 3D printing. “You only put material where you need to have material,”
says
Andy Hawkins, lead engineer on the EADS project. The parts his team is
making
are more svelte, even elegant. This is because without manufacturing
constraints they can be better optimised for their purpose. Compared with a
machined part, the printed one is some 60% lighter but still as sturdy.
 
Form follows function
 
Lightness is critical in making aircraft. A reduction of 1kg in the weight
of
an airliner will save around $3,000-worth of fuel a year and by the same
token cut carbon-dioxide emissions. Additive manufacturing could thus help
build greener aircraft—especially if all the 1,000 or so titanium parts in
an
airliner can be printed. Although the size of printable parts is limited for
now by the size of 3D printers, the EADS group believes that bigger systems
are possible, including one that could fit on the 35-metre-long gantry used
to build composite airliner wings. This would allow titanium components to
be
printed directly onto the structure of the wing.
 
Many believe that the enhanced performance of additively manufactured items
will be the most important factor in driving the technology forward. It
certainly is for MIT’s Mr Schmitt, whose interest lies in “original
machines”. These are devices not constructed from a collection of
prefabricated parts, but created in a form that flows from the intention of
the design. If that sounds a bit arty, it is: Mr Schmitt is a former art
student from Germany who used to cadge time on factory lathes and milling
machines to make mechanised sculptures. He is now working on novel servo
mechanisms, the basic building blocks for robots. Custom-made servos cost
many times the price of off-the-shelf ones. Mr Schmitt says it should be
possible for a robot builder to specify what a servo needs to do, rather
than
how it needs to be made, and send that information to a 3D printer, and for
the machine’s software to know how to produce it at a low cost. “This makes
manufacturing more accessible,” says Mr Schmitt.
 
The idea of the 3D printer determining the form of the items it produces
intrigues Neri Oxman, an architect and designer who heads a research group
examining new ways to make things at MIT’s Media Lab. She is building a
printer to explore how new designs could be produced. Dr Oxman believes the
design and construction of objects could be transformed using principles
inspired by nature, resulting in shapes that are impossible to build without
additive manufacturing. She has made items from sculpture to body armour and
is even looking at buildings, erected with computer-guided nozzles that
deposit successive layers of concrete.
 
Some 3D systems allow the properties and internal structure of the material
being printed to be varied. This year, for instance, Within Technologies
expects to begin offering titanium medical implants with features that
resemble bone. The company’s femur implant is dense where stiffness and
strength is required, but it also has strong lattice structures which would
encourage the growth of bone onto the implant. Such implants are more likely
to stay put than conventional ones.
 
Working at such a fine level of internal detail allows the stiffness and
flexibility of an object to be determined at any point, says Siavash
Mahdavi,
the chief executive of Within Technologies. Dr Mahdavi is working on other
lattice structures, including aerodynamic body parts for racing cars and
special insoles for a firm that hopes to make the world’s most comfortable
stiletto-heeled shoes.
 
Digital Forming, a related company (where Dr Mahdavi is chief technology
officer), uses 3D design software to help consumers customise mass-produced
products. For example, it is offering a service to mobile-phone companies in
which subscribers can go online to change the shape, colour and other
features of the case of their new phone. The software keeps the user within
the bounds of the achievable. Once the design is submitted the casing is
printed. Lisa Harouni, the company’s managing director, says the process
could be applied to almost any consumer product, from jewellery to
furniture.
“I don’t have any doubt that this technology will change the way we
manufacture things,” she says.
 
Other services allow individuals to upload their own designs and have them
printed. Shapeways, a New York-based firm spun out of Philips, a Dutch
electronics company, last year, offers personalised 3D production, or “mass
customisation”, as Peter Weijmarshausen, its chief executive, describes it.
Shapeways prints more than 10,000 unique products every month from materials
that range from stainless steel to glass, plastics and sandstone. Customers
include individuals and shopkeepers, many ordering jewellery, gifts and
gadgets to sell in their stores.
 
EOS, a German supplier of laser-sintering 3D printers, says they are already
being used to make plastic and metal production parts by carmakers,
aerospace
firms and consumer-products companies. And by dentists: up to 450 dental
crowns, each tailored for an individual patient, can be manufactured in one
go in a day by a single machine, says EOS. Some craft producers of crowns
would do well to manage a dozen a day. As an engineering exercise, EOS also
printed the parts for a violin using a high-performance industrial polymer,
had it assembled by a professional violin-maker and played by a concert
violinist.
 
Both EOS and Stratasys, a company based in Minneapolis which makes 3D
printers that employ plastic-deposition technology, use their own machines
to
print parts that are, in turn, used to build more printers. Stratasys is
even
trying to print a car, or at least the body of one, for Kor Ecologic, a
company in Winnipeg, whose boss, Jim Kor, is developing an electric-hybrid
vehicle called Urbee. Jim Kor’s printed the model. Next, the car
 
Making low-volume, high-value and customised components is all very well,
but
could additive manufacturing really compete with mass-production techniques
that have been honed for over a century? Established techniques are unlikely
to be swept away, but it is already clear that the factories of the future
will have 3D printers working alongside milling machines, presses, foundries
and plastic injection-moulding equipment, and taking on an increasing amount
of the work done by those machines.
 
Morris Technologies, based in Cincinnati, was one of the first companies to
invest heavily in additive manufacturing for the engineering and production
services it offers to companies. Its first intention was to make prototypes
quickly, but by 2007 the company says it realised “a new industry was being
born” and so it set up another firm, Rapid Quality Manufacturing, to
concentrate on the additive manufacturing of higher volumes of production
parts. It says many small and medium-sized components can be turned from
computer designs into production-quality metal parts in hours or days,
against days or weeks using traditional processes. And the printers can
build
unattended, 24 hours a day.
 
Neil Hopkinson has no doubts that 3D printing will compete with mass
manufacturing in many areas. His team at Loughborough University has
invented
a high-speed sintering system. It uses inkjet print-heads to deposit
infra-red-absorbing ink on layers of polymer powder which are fused into
solid shapes with infra-red heating. Among other projects, the group is
examining the potential for making plastic buckles for Burton Snowboards, a
leading American producer of winter-sports equipment. Such items are
typically produced by plastic injection-moulding. Dr Hopkinson says his
process can make them for ten pence (16 cents) each, which is highly
competitive with injection-moulding. Moreover, the designs could easily be
changed without Burton incurring high retooling costs.
 
Predicting how quickly additive manufacturing will be taken up by industry
is
difficult, adds Dr Hopkinson. That is not necessarily because of the
conservative nature of manufacturers, but rather because some processes have
already moved surprisingly fast. Only a few years ago making decorative
lampshades with 3D printers seemed to be a highly unlikely business, but it
has become an industry with many competing firms and sales volumes in the
thousands.
 
Dr Hopkinson thinks Loughborough’s process is already competitive with
injection-moulding at production runs of around 1,000 items. With further
development he expects that within five years it would be competitive in
runs
of tens if not hundreds of thousands. Once 3D printing machines are able to
crank out products in such numbers, then more manufacturers will look to
adopt the technology.
 
Will Sillar of Legerwood, a British firm of consultants, expects to see the
emergence of what he calls the “digital production plant”: firms will no
longer need so much capital tied up in tooling costs, work-in-progress and
raw materials, he says. Moreover, the time to take a digital design from
concept to production will drop, he believes, by as much as 50-80%. The
ability to overcome production constraints and make new things will combine
with improvements to the technology and greater mechanisation to make 3D
printing more mainstream.

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