Why 3D Printing Promises a "Mini" Industrial Revolution

While better late than never, much of the industrialized world is finally coming to terms with the inalienable facts of life: Successful enterprises demand constant innovation; there is no economic model immune to global forces; and no society can afford the luxury of unadulterated consumption without smarter production–with the emphasis on smarter.

Essentially, then, the challenge to industries—and even economies—today is one of competitiveness. In order to compete in an ever-tighter globalized marketplace, companies need to identify real pains, work hard to build better products to answer those pains, and provide them to market at the right time and the right price. Businesses that want to survive and grow must deliver fast turnaround from initial design to final production of goods, and the cost/quality of the goods must continually aspire upwards. A juggling act. Getting it right of course is part science and part art/intuition.

What if we could improve the science part of that equation and help make the production of goods more efficient and at the end of the day, more profitable?

Companies now recognize that 3D printing is an essential process for delivering a fast design-to-production turnaround and improving the cost-to-quality ratio of the end products that go to market. Once upon a time no one would have believed it possible to design a product on a computer screen and then be able to hold and test the actual part less than an hour later. 3D printing technology does just that. And the advantages are two-fold: speed and realism.

To understand this better, let’s first take a step back. For decades, prototyping has been a major Achilles heel for modern mass-production and rapid manufacturing processes. That’s because prototyping falls outside of the economies of scale parameters. Workshop lathes, boring machines, planning and slotting and shaping machines were all invented in the early eighteen hundreds in northern England, where manufacturers finally succeeded in replacing hand-built, wood framed machines with tougher, metal framed machines, able to mass produce robust, cheap metal parts. Until recently, manufacturers never succeeded in replicating the cost-efficiency of “industrialization” for the prototyping process.

Architects paid students to painstakingly build and glue cardboard models of their buildings. Car manufacturers hired teams to build heavy clay models of their next generation of vehicles; dental labs used inconvenient and messy bite impressions to design veneers, crowns and orthodontic appliances. All of this takes up manpower hours, is difficult and expensive to repeat, and does not accurately represent the end product they are seeking
to test.

And because machine tools, presses, injection machines and molds remain expensive to produce, rather than replace the capital equipment, it’s often easier to simply live with a mediocre design. And thus the end quality of the products we make has suffered as an inevitable “cost” or side-effect of modern production. Even with the advent of CAD/CAM and faster, more accurate design techniques, projects still remain massive budget items that can stretch on for years—particularly in the larger strategic manufacturing sectors such as defense. And how often do projects get delivered on time or on budget?

However, with 3D printing technology, the prototyping process has now caught up. 3D printing technology puts an immediate end to the manual prototyping bottleneck by providing a rapid and automatic means of fashioning unique, one-of-a-kind parts that can be accurately tested in real-world scenarios, and that better resemble the end product, well before the design is placed into production.

Along with speed, 3D printing provides the massive advantage of producing realistic representations that can be properly tested and checked for design faults early on in the design cycle. Once a design fault is identified in the model, designers and engineers can simply tweak the design on the CAD program and print and test again, as many times as they like, until the design is perfected and the CAD meets up to their fit, form and function requirements.

One thing that stands out when you handle 3D printed models, particularly if they are printed using a high-resolution, multi-material technology such as Objet’s inkjet based 3D printers, is that they actually look and function like the products they aim to prototype—a huge advantage over other techniques.

While conceptually inkjet based 3D printing is similar to 2D printing, in reality it jets a polymer instead of ink and the printer surface moves down as the model “grows” on the build tray. One of the most outstanding aspects of this type of additive technique is its ability to jet different materials with different properties within homogenously grown parts. So, for example, a toy car can be printed with rubber-like properties at the wheels and a hard chassis. And the wheels will actually rotate—with no need for assembly at all. Using additive 3D printing techniques, designers and engineers can create whole 3D prototypes and functional parts from nothing, layer by layer, directly from their standard CAD design software.

With such a technology at their fingertips, product designers and engineers can now literally fly through tedious prototyping cycles that used to take weeks or even months and that involved designs being sent away to be hand-crafted and then painstakingly packed and shipped back for evaluation. The result is a faster, simpler prototyping process which results in a better end-product.

So what is the implication for businesses and national economies as they continue to look for ways to boost competitiveness and beat the slowdown through 2011 and beyond?

Essentially, 3D printing and rapid prototyping will enable a new, mini-industrial revolution. Companies and economies smart enough to invest now will be able to differentiate themselves by producing market-winning products of superior quality—but this time, more quickly and cheaply than ever before. Low cost will no longer automatically translate into compromise on quality or functionality.

With such a technology at the fingertips of an entire national economy, the “Made in America” label suddenly has the potential to convey once again, the message of affordable quality, as opposed to protectionist sentiment. We have the potential in 3D printing, rapid prototyping and additive manufacturing to re-establish the price/quality benchmark for every industry around the world once more.