[P2P-F] excerpt from Economist: 3D printing: The printed world

Mon Apr 4 11:06:13 CEST 2011

 Economist: 3D printing: The printed
world<http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/t/2dae4200008015cd>
Bryan
Bishop <kanzure at gmail.com> Mar 21 04:32PM -0500
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From: Premise Checker <checker at panix.com>
Date: Mon, Mar 21, 2011 at 12:30 PM

This is a terribly important article. Here are three paragraphs. If you
can't get it all, let me know, since I have a password.

3D printing: The printed world
http://www.economist.com/node/18114221
[Editorial added. Thanks to Jeff for this.]

Three-dimensional printing from digital designs will transform
manufacturing and allow more people to start making things

Feb 10th 2011

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. "The market will come to the technology," Mr Sillar
says.

Some in the industry believe that the effect of 3D printing on
manufacturing will be analogous to

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