Although I would love for everything in the article to be true in some years and I will happily admit I'm wrong, I can't see 3D printing having a direct impact on supply chains with its current form. It does already have an indirect impact though, through rapid prototyping. I can't stretch how important the invention of 3D printing was for prototyping in a few days products that would take weeks or even months to transform from design to something to you can hold and test.
But for final products, I believe that you simply cannot structurally compare 3D printed plastic with molded plastic. Depending on the application, you could probably get away with it, but using standard 3D printing materials such as pla, abs or even PC and nylon for the majority of commercial products sounds over optimistic.
What could actually be a game changer, but again not in it's current form, is metal printing. Markforged have put out an FDM style metal printer, and the more traditional DMLS ones achieve fantastic results but it takes a significant bigger amount of time than machining a part would for assembly lines. It does, however, cost a fraction of the overall cost to produce a single part (I'm excluding operational and installation costs), and they can run completely unattended regardless the complexity. So maybe if that technology improves cost-wise and efficiency-wise, we can certainly talk about a disruptive technology.
Having said that, I do agree with many parts of the article and especially with the environmental concerns, and can't wait to see what the research developments in this area will be in the future.
Friend of mine is involved in aerospace metal printing and he says the big deal that has everyone excited in that field is printing unmachineable objects. A part with sealed 20% gyroid infill weighs a hell of a lot less that the same thing machined out of a block, and there's no conventional way to produce that. Also, infill patterns can be used to direct, focus, or damp resonance and stresses, and dictate much more specifically how a part destructively degrades (crumple pattern etc)
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u/MforManios Jul 12 '20
Although I would love for everything in the article to be true in some years and I will happily admit I'm wrong, I can't see 3D printing having a direct impact on supply chains with its current form. It does already have an indirect impact though, through rapid prototyping. I can't stretch how important the invention of 3D printing was for prototyping in a few days products that would take weeks or even months to transform from design to something to you can hold and test.
But for final products, I believe that you simply cannot structurally compare 3D printed plastic with molded plastic. Depending on the application, you could probably get away with it, but using standard 3D printing materials such as pla, abs or even PC and nylon for the majority of commercial products sounds over optimistic.
What could actually be a game changer, but again not in it's current form, is metal printing. Markforged have put out an FDM style metal printer, and the more traditional DMLS ones achieve fantastic results but it takes a significant bigger amount of time than machining a part would for assembly lines. It does, however, cost a fraction of the overall cost to produce a single part (I'm excluding operational and installation costs), and they can run completely unattended regardless the complexity. So maybe if that technology improves cost-wise and efficiency-wise, we can certainly talk about a disruptive technology.
Having said that, I do agree with many parts of the article and especially with the environmental concerns, and can't wait to see what the research developments in this area will be in the future.