Worldwide manufacturing revolution in 3D printing

31st July 2013

Worldwide manufacturing revolution in 3D printing

Additive manufacturing technologies such as 3D printing are the next major movement in manufacturing since the digital revolution.

“These technology are good for New Zealand's small volume, high complexity product manufacturing and open up huge potential with almost unlimited design freedom”, said visiting Hood Fellow, Professor Gideon Levy, a world expert on additive manufacturing.

He was speaking to a packed lecture theatre of about 280 people including representatives from industry, at The University of Auckland last week.

“If you are not using 3D printing for rapid prototyping in manufacturing now, you are making a mistake”, he said. “Industry uptake of this technology for direct manufacture was limited until recently. Now it is taking off around the world.”

“The industrialisation age of additive manufacturing is now upon us,” said Professor Levy.
Professor Levy has had an extensive career in manufacturing technologies and has been at the forefront of the commercial use of additive manufacturing since its inception. He was named in the Time Compression Technologies List of the Top 25 Most Influential People in Rapid Product Development and Manufacturing.

He told The University of Auckland audience that 3D printing or additive manufacturing was a young technology that had grown in popularity again this year, after it was promoted in a speech by US President Obama, who said “3D printing has the potential to revolutionise the way we make almost everything.”

“It’s a very exciting technology with many opportunities and challenges,” said Professor Levy. “It’s also a very complex technology with four key elements that are all essential to it.”
The four key elements of this ‘enabling multi-disciplinary technology’ are;

• the system and process with dedicated applications depending on its specific physical principle
• the materials that belong to it such as polymers, metals, ceramics, composites and biological
• the applications already used, such as for aviation, jewellery, automotive and industry and medical devices
• and the up and downstream preparation including designs, finishing, modifications and coatings

3D printers operate adding layer upon layer laser for manufacturing objects. Seven families were defined by the ASTM standards including powder bed fusion or material extrusion processes.

Professor Levy outlined the seven additive manufacturing processes where each can use different combinations of specific materials and the machines that are available.

“The material is dedicated to the process that uses the application – it is very tight, but it also has many interesting features.”

He said the value chain in product creation included concept modelling, rapid prototyping, pre-serie bridging, and conformal cooling to additive manufacturing.

“In a few years it is estimate that 50 per cent of all complex parts will be made using additive manufacturing,” he said. “It is a very agile and innovative technology, and in five years we expect it will be state of the art, and we will also have commercialized 3D bio-printing.”

“Today’s interest is high in additive manufacturing, especially for the manufacture of real parts which are going direct to the final product and to the final customer.”

Another development was continuous production, (instead of batch by batch production) achieving productivity and automation, invented by some companies that were focused on getting more efficiency from their system.

Biomaterials increasing in use now included polymers that were bio-compatible and synthetic and natural bio-materials, called biological direct cell substances and acellular tissue matrices that acted as biological scaffolds.

To meet the need to get closer to nature, we can use two processes – one top down, the other bottom up – to achieve this,” he said. “We try to build scaffolding to fill it with living cells or taking cells and putting it together that way.”

“This technique is called tissue engineering where we create real body parts with this technology and produce in situ manufacturing of body parts.”

“With additive manufacturing, the sky is the limit,” said Professor Levy.

The Visiting Hood Fellow is sponsored by the Lion Foundation.

ENDS

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