A n amazing transformation is currently under way in manufacturing, across nearly all types of products — a transformation that promises to remake the future into a sustainable and personally customized environment. In this fast-approaching future, everything we need — from products to food, and even our bodies themselves — can be replaced or reconstructed rapidly and with very minimal waste. This is not the slow change of progress from one generation of iPhone to the next, but instead a true revolution, mirroring the changes that introduced the world to the Industrial Age and then bought light and electricity to our homes and businesses.
This will not be a “bloodless coup” by any means; any truly fundamental change that spans all aspects of the global economy will, by its nature, be disruptive. But traditional inefficient ways of producing the next year’s model will surely give way to entirely new opportunities impossible to imagine before. The technology behind this transformation is referred to as additive manufacturing, 3D printing, or direct digital manufacturing
By whatever name, in the coming decade this technology will be used to construct everything from houses to jet engines, airplanes, food, and even replacement tissues and organs made from your own cells! Every day new applications of 3D printing are being discovered and developed all over the world. And even in space: NASA is testing designs that will function in zero gravity, on the airless moon, and even to support human exploration of
other planets like Mars. (See Figure 1-1 for a glimpse.) Hold on tight, because in the chapters ahead we cover a lot of incredibly new and fantastic technol ogies — and before the end, we show you how you can get involved in this amazing transformation yourself by building and using a 3D printer at home.
Embracing Additive Manufacturing
So, what is “additive manufacturing,” you might ask? Additive manufacturing is a little like the “replicators” in the Star Trek universe, which allow the captain to order “Tea, Earl Grey, hot” and have a cup filled with liquid appear fully formed and ready for consumption. We are not quite to that level, but today’s 3D printers perform additive manufacturing by taking a 3D model of a object stored in a computer, translating it into a series of very thin layers, and then building the object one layer at a time, stacking up material until the object is ready for use.
3D printers are much like the familiar desktop printer you already use at work or in your home to create copies of documents transmitted electroni cally or created on your computer, except that a 3D printer creates a solid three- dimensional object out of a variety of materials, not just a simple paper document. Since the time of Johannes Gutenberg, creating multiple printed docu ments has brought literacy to the world. Today, when you click the Print button in a word processor application, you merge the functions of writers, stenographers, editors (spellcheck), layout, illumination (coloring and adding in images), and press reproduction all into a single task, and with the click of a few more buttons, you can post the document you create onto the Internet and allow it to be shared, downloaded, and printed out by others all over the world.
3D printing does the exact same thing for objects: Designs and virtual 3D models for physical objects can be shared, downloaded, and then printed out into physical form. It’s hard to imagine what Johannes Gutenberg would have made of that.
Defining additive manufacturing
Why is additive manufacturing called “additive?” Additive manufacturing works by bringing the design of an object — its shape — into a computer model, then dividing that model into separate layers that can stack atop another to form the final object. It reimagines a three-dimensional object as a series of stackable layers that, when added together, forms the finished object. (See Figure 1-2.) Whether this object is a tea cup or a house, the pro cess starts with the base layer and then builds up each additional layer until the full object has been completed.
My children did this before they ever saw my first 3D printer. They discov ered they could use crackers and cheese spray for more than just a snack — they could build towers and grand designs simply by layering crackers and cheese on top of each other. These edible structures show the potential in additive manufacturing. Each cracker was given a personalized application of cheese to spell out names, draw designs, and even to build shapes and support tiny pyramids. The resulting snacks were both unique and also customized to exactly the design each child wanted.
3D printers build up layers of material in a few different ways: Either they fuse liquid polymers with a laser, bind small granular particles using a laser or a liquid binding material, or they extrude melted materials out like a tube of toothpaste squeezed onto a toothbrush. However, 3D printers perform their additive manufacturing using many more materials than just tooth paste or cheese spray. They can fabricate items using photo-curable plastic polymers, melted plastic filament, metal powders, concrete, and many other types of material — including biological cells that can form amazingly complex structures to replace, repair, and even augment our own bodies.
Just as the rings of a tree show the additive layers of growth to the tree each year, additive manufacturing builds up objects one layer at a time. In this way we can create a small plastic toy, a whole car, and very soon an entire house (with all of its furnishings), or even complete airplanes with interlocking parts. Research today on conductive materials suggests that wires will soon become just another part of the additive manufacturing process, by allow ing them to be printed directly into an object itself instead of having to be installed later.
Contrasting traditional manufacturing
How does this additive manufacturing compare to the traditional methods of production that have worked just fine since the First Industrial Revolution in the 1700’s transformed manufacturing from hand production to automated production, using water and steam to drive machine tools? Why do we need to take up another disruptive technological shift after the Second Industrial Revolution in the 1800’s transformed the world through the increased use of steam-powered vehicles and the factories that made mass manufacturing possible? Today, we stand at the opening moment of the next transformation, a Third Industrial Revolution, where mass manufacturing and global transfer of bulk goods will be set aside in favor of locally-produced and highly person alized individual production fitting society’s transition to a truly global phase of continuous self-upgrade and incremental local innovation.
The First Industrial Revolution’s disruption of society was so fundamental that governments had to pass laws to protect domestic wool textile produc tion in England against new power-woven cotton textiles being imported
from the East Indies. The spinning jenny and automated flyer-and-bobbin looms allowed a small number of people to weave hundreds of yards of fabric every week, whereas hand weavers took months to card plant fibers or shorn hair, spin the material into thread, and then weave many spools of thread into a few yards’ worth of fabric. Suddenly, these new industrial technolo gies like the automated loom shown in Figure 1-3 were putting weavers out of work, sparking the formation of the Luddite movement that tried to resist this transformation. Fortunately, the capability for the new technologies to provide clothes to families eventually won that argument and the world was transformed.
A few years later, the Second Industrial Revolution’s disruption of society was even more pronounced, because automation provided alternatives not limited by the power of a man or horse, and steam power freed even mas sive industrial applications from their existence alongside rivers and water wheels, and allowed them to become mobile. The difficulties traditional work ers faced with these new technologies are embodied in the tale of folk hero John Henry, chronicled in the powerful folk song “The Ballad of John Henry,” who proved his worth by outdigging a steam-driven hammer by a few inches’ depth before dying from the effort. This song and many like it were heralded as proof of mankind’s value in the face of automation, and yet the simple fact that the steam hammer could go on day after day without need for food or rest, long after John Henry was dead and gone, tells the tale of why that disruption has been adopted as the standard in the years since.
Here at the edge of the transformation that may one day be known as the Third Industrial Revolution, the disruptive potential of additive manufac turing is obvious. Traditional ways of mass manufacturing, which makes products by milling, machining, or molding raw materials; shipping these materials all over the world; refining the materials into components; assem bling the components into the final products in tremendous numbers to bring per-unit costs down; shipping those products from faraway locations with lower production costs (and more lenient workers’ rights laws); storing vast numbers of products in huge warehouses; and finally shipping the products to big-box stores and other distributers so they can reach actual consumers, is comparatively inefficient in the extreme.
Because of the costs involved, traditional manufacturing favors products that appeal to as many people as possible, preferring one-size-fits-most over cus tomization and personalization. This limits flexibility, because it is impossible to predict what the actual consumption of products will look like by the time next year’s model is available in stores. This process is also incredibly time consuming and wasteful of key resources like oil, and the pollution resulting from the transportation of mass manufactured goods is costly to the planet.
Machining/subtractive fabrication
Because additive manufacturing can produce completed products — even items with interlocking moving parts such as bearings within wheels or linked chains — 3D-printed items require much less finishing and processing than traditionally manufactured items. The traditional approach uses subtractive fabrication procedures, such as milling, machining, drilling, fold ing, and polishing to prepare even the initial components of a product. The traditional approach must account for every step of the manufacturing pro cess, even a step as minor as drilling a hole, folding a piece of sheet metal, or polishing a milled edge, because such steps require human intervention and management of the assembly-line process — which therefore adds cost to the end product
Yes, this means that fewer machining techs will be needed after the Third Industrial Revolution occurs, but it also means that products can be produced very quickly, using far fewer materials. It’s much cheaper to put down materi als only where they’re needed, rather than to start with blocks of raw materials and mill away unnecessary material until you achieve the final form. Ideally the additive process will allow you to reimagine 3D-printed products from the ground up, perhaps even allowing you to use complex open interior spaces that reduce materials and weight while retaining strength. And addi tive manufactured products are formed with all necessary holes, cavities, flat planes, and outer shells already in place, removing the need for many of the steps in traditional fabrication.
Molding/injection molding
Traditional durable goods, such as the components for automobiles, air craft, and skyscrapers, are fabricated by pouring molten metal into molds or through tooled dies at a foundry. This same technology was adapted to create plastic goods: Melted plastic is forced into injection molds to produce the desired end product. Molding materials such as glass made it possible for every house to have windows, and for magnificent towers of glass and steel to surmount every major city in the world.
However, traditional mold-making involves the complex creation of master molds, which are used to fashion products as precisely alike as possible. To create a second type of product, a new mold is needed, which can in turn be used to create only that individual design over and over. This can be a time consuming process. 3D printers, however, allow new molds to be created rapidly so that a manufacturer can quickly adapt to meet new design require ments, to keep up with changing fashions, or to achieve any other necessary change. Or, alternatively, a manufacturer could simply use the 3D printer to create its products directly, and modify the design to include unique features on the fly. This direct digital manufacturing process is currently being used by GE to create 24,000 jet-engine fuel assemblies each year, an approach that can be easily changed mid-process if a design flaw is later discovered, simply by modifying the design in a computer and printing out replacement parts — something that would require complete retooling in a traditional mass-fabrication process
Understanding the advantages of additive manufacturing
Because computer models and designs can be transported electronically or shared for download across the Internet, additive manufacturing allows manufacturers to let customers design their own personalized versions of products. In today’s interconnected world, the ability to quickly modify products to appeal to a variety of cultures and climates is not insignificant.
In general, the advantages additive manufacturing offers can be grouped into the following categories:
Personalization
Complexity
Sustainability
Recycling and planned obsolescence
Economies of scale
The next few sections talk about these in greater detail.
Personalization
Personalization at the time of fabrication allows additive-manufactured goods to fit each individual consumer’s preferences more closely — in terms of form, materials, design, or even coloring, as we discuss in later chapters.
Nokia, for example, recently released a 3D-printable case design for its Lumina 820 phone, making it available for free download and modification using the Creative Commons licensing model. (See Figure 1-5.) In no time, people within the 3D-printing community created many different variations of this case and posted them to services like the Thingiverse 3D object repository. These improvements were rapidly shared among members of the community, who used them to create highly customized versions of the case, and Nokia gained value in the eyes of its consumer base through this capability.
Creative Commons Licensing refers to several copyright licenses developed by the nonprofit Creative Commons organization to allow designers to share their designs with others, reserving specific rights and waiving others to allow other creators to share and expand on their designs without complex formal copyright licensing for traditional intellectual property controls.
Complexity
Because every layer of an object is created sequentially, 3D printing makes it possible to create complex internal structures that would be impossible to achieve with traditional molded or cast parts. Structures that are not load-bearing can have walls that are thin or even absent altogether, with additional support material added elsewhere during printing. If strength or rigidity are desired qualities but weight is a consideration (as in the frame elements of race cars), additive manufacturing can create partially filled internal voids with honeycomb structures, resulting in rigid, lightweight alter natives. Structures modeled from nature, mimicking (say) the bones of a bird, can be created using additive manufacturing techniques to create wholly new product capabilities not possible in traditional manufacturing.
When you consider that this technology will soon be capable of printing entire houses as well as the materials therein, you can see how easily it can affect more prosaic industries. Consider moving companies — in the future, moving from one house to another may be a simple matter involving transfer ring nothing more than a few boxes of personalized items (kid’s drawings and finger-painting, Grandma’s old tea set, and baby’s first shoes) from one house to another. There may come a time when we don’t need a moving company; we’ll just contact a company that will fabricate the same house and furnish ings (or a familiar one with a few new features) at the new location. That same company could reclaim materials used in the previous building and furnishings as a form of full recycling
Sustainability
By allowing strength and flexibility to vary within an object, 3D-printed com ponents can reduce the weight of products and save fuel — for one aircraft manufacturer, for example, just the redesign of its seatbelt buckles is esti mated to save tens of thousands of liters of aviation fuel across the lifetime of an aircraft. And by putting down materials only where they will need to be, additive manufacturing can allow a reduction in the amount of materials lost in post-production machining, which will conserve both money and resources.
Additive manufacturing also allows for the use of a variety of materials for many components, even for the melted plastic used in printers like the RepRap device we show you how to build later in this book. Acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS), with properties that are well known from its use in the manufacture of toys like the LEGO brick, is commonly used for home 3D printing, but it is a petrochemical-based plastic. Environmentally-conscious users could choose instead to use plant-based alternatives such as polylactic acid (PLA) to achieve similar results. Alternatives such as PLA are commonly created from corn or beets; however, the current research into producing industrial quantities of this material from algae may one day help reduce our dependence on petrochemical-based plastics
Additionally, other materials — even raw materials — can be used. Some 3D printers are designed to print out objects using concrete or even sand as raw materials! Using nothing more than the power of the sun concentrated through a lens, Markus Kayser, the inventor of the Solar Sinter, fashions sand into objects and even structures. Kayser uses a computer-controlled system to direct concentrated sunlight precisely where needed to melt granules of sand into a crude form of glass, which he uses, layer by layer, to build up bowls and other objects
Recycling and planned obsolescence
The Third Industrial Revolution offers a way to eliminate the traditional concept of planned obsolescence that is behind the current economic cycle. In fact, this revolution goes a long way toward making the entire concept of “obsolescence” obsolete. Comedian Jay Leno, for instance, who collects old cars, uses 3D printers to restore his outdated steam automobiles to service — even though parts have been unavailable for the better part of a century. With such technology, manufacturers would not even need to store copies of old parts; they would simply download the appropriate component design and print out a replacement when needed.
3D printers take advantage of sustainable construction methods, but beyond that, they can allow manufacturers to re-use existing materials and com ponents, with personalized and customizable attributes added to retain consumer interest. This could easily impact the cycle of reinvestment for major-purchase goods. By removing the endless cycle of planned obsoles cence with new seasonal models, we would reduce fundamental goods production in some trades and also reduce endless consumer debt accumulation to keep up with the cyclic purchasing of durable goods
Instead of industries — automobiles, houses, furniture, or clothing — end lessly pushing the next year’s or next season’s product lines, the future could well be focused on industries that retain investment in fundamental components, adding updates and reclaiming materials for future modifica tions. In this future, then, when a minor component on a capital good like a washing machine fails, a wholly new machine won’t need to be fabricated and shipped; the replacement will be created locally and the original returned to functional condition for a fraction of the cost and with minimal environmental impact
Economies of scale
Additive manufacturing allows for individual items to be created at the same per-item cost as multiple items of the same or similar designs. This is unlike traditional mass manufacturing, where fabrication of huge numbers of identi cal objects drops the per-item cost passed along to the consumer. Traditional manufacturers also choose areas of the world where labor laws and safety mandates are less restrictive in order to bring costs down further through reductions in labor expenses — and this, of course, is not an issue with additive manufacturing
Additive manufacturing, as it matures, may engender a fundamental trans formation in the production of material goods. Supporters present the possibility of ad-hoc personalized manufacturing close to consumers; critics argue at the damage this transition would make to economies that currently exist because of
mass manufacturing in lower-cost areas
bulk transportation of goods around the world
storage and distribution networks
Traditional manufacturing depends on these factors to bring products to consumers.
By placing production in close proximity to consumers, shipping and storing mass-produced goods will no longer be necessary. Cargo container ships, along with those costs associated with mass-manufacturing economies, may become a thing of the past.
It would be possible to repurpose these immense cargo ships to serve as floating additive manufacturing centers that could park offshore near their consumer base as we migrate away from traditional mass manufacturing fabrication centers. One example of the potential in this shift would be that manufacturers of winter- or summer-specific goods could simply float north or south for year-round production to meet consumer demand without the issues and costs associated with mass manufacturing’s transportation and storage cycles. Following a natural disaster, such a ship could also simply pull up offshore and start recycling bulk debris to repair and replace what was lost to the elements.
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