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ADDITIVE MANUFACTURING/3D PRINTING
FEATURE
REVOLUTIONARY FORCE IN PRODUCT DESIGN
3D PRINTING: THE
In the vast manufacturing landscape, 3D printing has transformed how we conceive and create objects. It encompasses a myriad of techniques, technologies, materials and uses, and offers advantages over more traditional manufacturing techniques. Protolabs outlines some of its benefits
GEOMETRY Innovations in 3D printing began in earnest in the 1980s and it is still one of the most rapidly developing manufacturing technologies, with new capabilities and materials being added all the time. What makes it unique is its ability to work with complex geometry. Where other processes have limitations, such as not being able to have internal channels with liquid injection or holes that end mills can’t reach, 3D printers can produce almost any shape imaginable. This has led to some truly innovative designs
that take advantage of 3D printing’s capabilities to make organic shapes, such as honeycombs or complex matrices. When combined with modern, highly engineered materials, it becomes possible to create some incredibly strong, strikingly beautiful parts with ease. It’s even possible to insert holes in the
design to reduce weight or simply to boost the aesthetics, without having to worry about drilling them or making major alterations to the mould. This offers a significant advantage over other technologies.
FLEXIBILITY The absence in 3D printing of any kind of mould or tooling is another advantage of the technology. Moulds and tooling can be expensive and time- consuming to set up, especially if you need to make any alterations to your design along the way. With 3D printing, making even significant changes to your part is simple. Rather than having to alter physical moulds or machining, you can click a few buttons and change up the CAD file associated with the project.
SPEED This ability to make quick, on-the-fly, alterations is a huge advantage for rapid prototyping. Not only is it easy to make the little changes that are
commonplace when you’re still hashing out a finished design, but you can turn those changes into a physical prototype in just a matter of hours. This allows your team to get right back into
the process of enhancing the design, rather than waiting days or even weeks for your newly manufactured prototypes to be delivered. In fact, this rapid production process can
also allow you to totally reimagine the way you handle inventory. Rather than having to warehouse parts and products, you can shift to a print-on-demand model. This slashes the amount of money and time dedicated to storage and inventory management.
COST Of course, 3D printing isn’t guaranteed to provide a cost reduction for every type of project. If you are, for example, producing something that’s relatively geometrically simple on a large scale, it is likely that injection moulding is going to be much cheaper in the long run, as it plays to this technology’s strengths. However, with products or prototypes that are
well-suited to the strengths of 3D printing, the technology can help to cut costs in many areas when compared to more conventional production. Labour costs, for example, can be reduced by a switch to 3D printing. After all, once they begin a task, the printers don’t need any operators or much in the way of supervision. You don’t need to worry about using multiple, multi-stage machines when you’re 3D printing your parts, nor do you normally need to worry about assembly.
MATERIALS Various materials can be used in 3D printing to suit the requirements of the product, including plastics, composites, resins and metals. Plastic parts generally have a shorter build time than metal due to the complexity of the metal printing processes and the fact that layer thicknesses in plastic printing can be much thicker. But, in some cases, metal is best. Direct Metal Laser Sintering (DMLS) is a game changer for prototyping of production- grade materials. Aerospace engineers can build fully functional metal components, such as heat exchangers, fuel nozzles and propeller drives, at speeds much faster than traditional methods such as die-casting. DMLS is useful in helping engineers reduce the weight and production time when developing complex end- use parts, critically reducing the number of components in aerospace assemblies. As technology advances, we can anticipate
even more groundbreaking developments that will shape the future of manufacturing and redefine what’s possible with 3D printing.
Protolabs
www.protolabs.com/en-gb/
NOVEMBER 2023 DESIGN SOLUTIONS 45
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