3D Printing Stocks

[BiotechValues]

Ten Principles of 3D Printing

From

Fabricated: The New World of 3D Printing (I highly recommend this book. I finished it this weekend and it provides great insight as to just how disruptive 3D Printing will be. It truly is game-changing technology.)

Published 2/2013
authors Hod Lipson and Melba Kurman

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Principle one: Manufacturing complexity is free. In traditional manufacturing, the more complicated an object's shape, the more it costs to make. In 3D printed manufacturing, the process of fabricating an ornate and complicated shape does not require more time, skill, or cost than printing a simple block. Free complexity will disrupt traditional pricing models and change how we calculate the cost of manufacturing things.


Principle two: Variety is free. A single 3D printer can make many shapes. Like a human artisan, a 3D printer can fabricate a different shape each time. In contrast, traditional manufacturing machines are much less versatile and can only make things in a limited spectrum of shapes. 3D printing removes the overhead costs associated with re-training human machinists or re-tooling factory machines.


Principle three: No assembly required. 3D printing can form objects that contain already interlocked parts. The more parts a product contains, the longer it takes to assemble and the more expensive it becomes to make. Less assembly will shorten supply chains, saving money on labor and transportation; shorter supply chains will be less polluting.


Principle four: Zero lead time. A 3D printer can print on demand, when an object is needed. The capacity for on-the-spot manufacturing reduces the need for companies to stockpile physical inventory. New types of business services become possible as 3D printers enable a business to make specialty--or custom--objects on demand in response to customer orders. .


Principle five: Unlimited design space. Traditional manufacturing technologies and human artisans can make only a finite repertoire of shapes. A 3D printer removes these barriers and can fabricate shapes that until now have been possible only in nature, opening up vast new design spaces.


Principle six: Zero skill manufacturing. Traditional manufacturing machines still demand that a skilled expert to adjust and calibrate them. A 3D printer gets most of its guidance from a design file. Unskilled manufacturing opens up new business models and could offer new modes of production for people in remote environments or extreme circumstances.


Principle seven: Compact, portable manufacturing. Per volume of production space, a 3D printer has more manufacturing capacity than a traditional manufacturing machine. For example, an injection molding machine can only make objects significantly smaller than itself. In contrast, a 3D printer can fabricate objects as large as its print bed. If a 3D printer is arranged so its printing apparatus can move freely, a 3D printer can fabricate objects larger than itself.


Principle eight: Less waste by-product. 3D printing in metal creates less waste by-product than the traditional grinding or molding techniques used in mass manufacturing. Machining metal is highly wasteful as an estimated 90 percent of the original metal gets ground off and ends up on the factory floor. Plastic-based 3D printing is also rapidly becoming greener as polymer-based printing materials improve and less waste byproduct is created..


Principle nine: Infinite shades of materials. Combining different raw materials into a single product is difficult using today's manufacturing machines. As multi-material 3D printing develops, we will gain the capacity to blend and mix different raw materials. New previously inaccessible blends of raw material offer us a much larger, mostly unexplored palette of materials that have novel properties or useful types of behaviors.


Principle ten: Precise physical replication. A digital music file can be endlessly copied with no loss of audio quality. In the future, 3D printing will extend this digital precision and repeatability to the world of physical objects