3D Printing is set of manufacturing processes that progressively add layers of material to manufacture your products, and it could change the way you go about engineering your products. Instead of being held back by manufacturing constraints, you can design the component you need focused only on the function it requires to perform and meet warfighters needs.
You have full control over the interior structure of the part, so you can include voids, lattices, and other hard-to-manufacture structural components that can help cut down on material use and increase functionality. Subassemblies used to require multiple parts can be combined into a single component. You can customise everything you make to suit your individual customers preferences.
With all the recent innovations in the additive manufacturing industries, now is the time to consider additive as a viable alternative to traditional manufacturing approaches and how to best take advantage of the design freedom it offers.
What began as a rapid prototyping tool has now transformed into a multi-faceted manufacturing system capable of producing a wide variety of parts to functional specifications.
3D design data described in a digital file is used to develop a component by depositing materials — including metals, plastics, and composites — in layers. Technology and innovation are reshaping industries across the world at a breathless and breakneck speed. 3D printing or additive manufacturing is one technology that is set to revolutionised the aircraft industry.
Significant advances in the field over the past decade have transformed the design, development, manufacturing, and distribution processes in the sector, making ways for novel designs, lighter and safer products, shorter lead times, and lower costs.
3D printing has become the one of the most exciting prospects of the aircraft world, enhancing the functionality and value of existing products in every way. The concept seems new but has been around for more than 30 years. It involves a process where 3D design data described in a digital file is used to develop a component by depositing materials in layers. The materials used in 3D printing include a wide range of metals, plastics, and composite materials.
The additive manufacturing field is highly competitive and, therefore, large and small players in the space focus on specific capabilities that can lead to greater competitiveness. Some of these capabilities include fewer design restrictions and direct production of final components by eliminating the need for new tooling.
When you set out to design products, you typically have to design around the manufacturing process, which results in additional costs, time, or even material. Imagine being able to fully combine what was previously a set of subassemblies into one manufacturable part.
You have likely had to over-design certain parts to withstand common manufacturing processes, creating a dilemma that additive manufacturing can help you get around. When you design with additive manufacturing in mind, you can forget about designing for anything other than functionality. Looking deeper into this, you can save time in the design process while also saving money in manufacturing costs relative to design complexity.
As engineers, we’re always thinking of new ways to improve components and designs. We have all had amazing ideas, only for them to crumble with the realisation it would be nearly impossible to manufacture. With AM, you can enter the realm you previously thought impossible – releasing your full problem-solving potential. Design for manufacturability is a proactive process used to maximise the design of components for the intended manufacturing process.
Looking over the typical manufacturing processes of machining, casting, injection molding, and forming, we see the shortcomings in each technique. When you design with injection molding, you are bound by many limitations, from quality assurance to assembly issues.
In addition to being limited to solid components, you are also limited by shapes and designs of parts to allow for mold separation. However, what if you don’t need a solid structured part or need one with a complex shape? With previous forms of manufacturing, you would be kind of stuck; but not with additive.
Let’s look to machining, one of the many great forms of manufacturing, yet full of limitations. When your part is being machined, there is room for operator error and you are limited in degrees of freedom from the machining head. While you can generally design around these constraints, why do it when you don’t need to?
Each manufacturing process you want to use requires that you have some knowledge of how it works when you design a component. All the time you spend learning how a manufacturing machine works could be spent improving your original design.
In situations where additive is applicable, it can compensate for many of the downsides of traditional techniques. You may also want to focus on improving the design and functionality of a part, but given time constraints you may not get a chance. Eliminating constraints in a project allows for you to focus your energy into actually improving your designs, rather than hassling with manufacturing.
While focusing on manufacturability may decrease cost, you can significantly increase value by focusing on improving design and functionality. Compromising on design just to make a product manufacturable hurts both the engineer and the integrity of the end product.
Perhaps the key aspect of additive manufacturing and what makes it the perfect fit for your possible needs is its ability to produce fully functional products without manufacturing setbacks. 3D printing overcomes traditional constraints and pushes you completely into designing for functionality. and passing test/evaluation benchmarks
There are obviously material limitations, but where it’s applicable, it can help out in your design process significantly. Since you have more time to focus on design and functionality with additive manufacturing there is a whole new array of opportunities that have never existed before, improving function. You now have options.
Your specific computer programmed design has its limits, but additive can push beyond them. For example, modeling latticed structures can be time-consuming at best. With many additive techniques, you can actually manufacture more complex parts and automatically pinpoint areas where material is unnecessary, and either remove it altogether or easily replace it with a complex lattice structure.
3D printing isn’t just about increasing the time you can spend on design, it’s about being able to manufacture beyond what you can currently easily design. It creates true design freedom.
Instead of creating complex subassemblies through multiple designs, you can focus on the function of your component.
Additive manufacturing requires absolutely no tooling, so the end product can be exactly what is needed to satisfy your customer. Instead of needing to compromise on certain specified design criteria due to manufacturing capabilities, additive manufacturing allows engineers to solve problems without constraints.
Whether you’re talking to your board of directors or your line manager, switching gears out of engineering mode to make a business case can be tough, especially when it comes to justifying a major capital expense.
It takes more than great specs to persuade senior executives to invest in new equipment, and with the rapidly changing pace of manufacturing, simple cost-per-part estimates don’t always illustrate the full benefits of acquiring new production technology.
3D printing or—when it’s referred to as a production technology—additive manufacturing is a great case in point. Traditionally, people equate a business case with the cost model of a part. So relative to a conventional part, the additive part is either more expensive or less expensive. And that’s the business case for a lot of companies. But it’s definitely not for additive manufacturing—we think it’s a lot more.”
Making a business case for additive manufacturing can be challenging. It’s still a relatively new technology and while 3D printers have been around for more than thirty years, many decision makers in manufacturing have been around longer than that.
Additive manufacturing also has a reputation as being good for prototyping, but unable compete on production applications compared with more traditional technologies, such as injection molding and computer numeric control machining.
Good business cases incorporates three components; a cost model, performance factors and supply chain disruption. A cost model represents the production part, tooling and infrastructure costs for a component. Business cases that focus on this aspect alone are typically not as successful as those which include these other factors.
Performance factors quantify the system-level benefits or impacts of a component or product in terms of their lifecycle costs. Supply chain disruption refers to innovative strategies for overcoming existing “pain points” within your business.
Seeing additive manufacturing from this broader perspective should make it easier to put together a business case for it, but you still need to do the actual legwork.
So, how do you make a business case for additive manufacturing? Defining a business case for additive manufacturing begins with understanding the cost distribution for the part being considered.
More broadly, it’s important to ask where most of your manufacturing costs are today.
If they’re concentrated in labour, materials or post-processing, you could potentially argue that using 3D printing would help drive those costs down, though the justification may not always be obvious.
For example, although materials for additive manufacturing may be pound-for-pound more expensive than their subtractive counterparts up front—consider the cost of a block of aluminum versus the equivalent mass of aluminum powder—they are also subject to considerably less waste.
In addition, the design freedom that comes with using additive manufacturing may allow you to reduce the amount of material that goes into each part, and cost of materials. The second component to designing a business case for additive manufacturing is identifying your desired part performance factors. during test/evaluation period.
In other words, what benefits can you point to that additive offers over traditional manufacturing processes?
If your application is in the aerospace industry, you can always point to the capability to produce lighter and stronger parts with additive manufacturing.
Once you’ve come to grips with your cost distribution and desired part performance factors, the next question to ask is, “What can you do to disrupt your supply chain? Maybe you have a part that is chronically on back order, Maybe you haven’t been able to negotiate with a supplier because you’ve been locked into their process for so long. That’s what we call supply chain disruption.”
In addition to disrupting your supply chain, additive manufacturing can also create new opportunities for growth. For example, additive could enable you to manufacture highly customised products or bring your parts to market faster.
“The business case is the sum total of all these factors and considerations. The fiscal values for some of these factors are obvious. If you can cut down on lead time or reduce the number of operations you need to make a part, the savings are straightforward. But consider part consolidation. What is the value proposition on reducing the number of parts in an assembly? Or what is the value of having the capability to consolidate parts in future assemblies?
As difficult as it may be, when defining a business case, it’s important to remove your engineering hat. You can talk about delamination and porosity until you’re blue in the face, but sometimes it all comes down to dollars and cents. Some parts will benefit from being additively manufactured, others will not. Of course, there are many cases where it’s obvious which parts you should and shouldn’t print.
Is your design prohibitively expensive—or even impossible—to machine? Then it’s probably a good candidate for additive manufacturing. Is this a high-volume application? Then you might want to explore injection molding.
Making a business case for implementing additive manufacturing in production goes beyond looking at discrete parts. “With 3D printing, you can look at parts as a system, rather than as individual pieces. You can combine multiple parts together or add functionality—things we could not have done with conventional manufacturing.”
For this reason, simple cost-per-part calculations are unlikely to yield accurate numbers when making a business case for additive manufacturing as a production technology.
If you look at a single part in isolation, producing it additively may be more expensive. However, if you look at it as part of an assembly and consider the new design options that additive opens up, then those numbers could be quite different.
“We have developed training programmes based on our own use of additive manufacturing . “What we don’t know are the requirements each customer has for their parts. They are of course the experts in their own parts, so by putting these two elements together, we think you will be able to rapidly accelerate customer additive prospects.
Additive Manufacturing Use Cases
One of the best examples of the benefits of additive manufacturing comes from one of the most famous parts in the aerospace industry: the additive fuel nozzle for a jet engine.
“Part consolidation came from looking at this in terms of a system. But when you have a part that’s five times as durable, customers will absolutely pay to maintain and service that part much less frequently.”
Additive manufacturing has reduced the weight of fuel nozzle by 25 percent. The benefits to weight reduction in aerospace applications include the ability to add new functionalities, carry heavier payloads or extend your range. Then there’s the cost. This part is less expensive than its predecessors.
A second example comes from replacing the structural castings on an engine with additive components. “By going additive, we shortened overall engine development time—almost cutting it in half—because we didn’t have to wait for tooling. Tooling can often be a chokepoint in development and manufacturing. The efficiency gains from being able to do without it should not be underestimated. The extra capital that comes from not needing tooling is able to be redirected to other efforts.
“We were able to invest in developing the heat exchanger by freeing up funds that had previously been used for structural castings and tooling. If you only need to spend a quarter of what you used to in development costs, you can do four separate parts for what you used to pay for one.”
As with any disruptive technology, new users often have trouble identifying the return on investment because they don’t appreciate the full extent of what it can do. Consider taking advantage of all the available resources and experts to help you navigate from business case to qualification and everything in between.
Additive manufacturing is well suited for many applications where parts are needed that simply can’t be easily produced using other methods like machining or injection molding.
One method uses a printhead that works on a level flat printing surface by laying down the choice of conductive chemical or material. This functionality is very similar to the way additive manufacturing works and it allows for fast production of custom circuit boards. Given the current way that circuit boards are mass manufactured, this additive technique makes possible one-off iterated designs.
3D printed circuit board technology uses an extruder head that can lay down beads of solder or conductive material on a printing surface in layers. Couple this “wire printing” method with a secondary material head, and manufacturers are slowly gaining the ability to create 3D printed circuit boards with intricate internal wiring.
Having the ability to design 3D connections in compact spaces is something that is otherwise impossible within the ways that circuit boards are currently produced. With 3D printed circuit board manufacturing, a drastic change in how electrical engineers see and build projects is beginning to form.
The current state of the additive manufacturing industry lies mostly with mechanical engineers and makers alike. 3D printing and other additive techniques allow engineers to rapidly prototype a given mechanical component or assembly. Even with all of the advancement that has surrounded this industry in recent years, it’s still early in development.
It’s important to point out that there are a few methods that allow for 3D printed circuit boards and are simultaneously fighting to become industry standards. But the world of 3D printed circuit boards can get a little more complex in both extrusion and material methods.
Conductive gels are used as well as embedded copper filament. Some machines utilise graphene substrate printing and on the cutting edge of experimentation, there is even conductive aerogel printing. Each of these various printing methods is undergoing extensive research in their practicality and usability. The idea of manufacturing circuits in this form will change how engineers think about electrical design.
This new manufacturing technique, like most new tech, won’t be a solution to all the electrical engineer’s problems, but these techniques will certainly emerge in the future.
There is a small niche in large-scale manufacturing that could allow for circuits to become integrated into materials. But as you can probably guess , any large scale industry adoption of 3D printed circuit boards is far off.
The most drastic way that we’ll see change is in the world of the makers. Production of machines capable of rapid-prototyping circuits will alter the art of the possible. Engineers may soon be able to rapidly prototype a circuit board without dealing with the harsh chemicals necessary with printed circuit board manufacturing.
As additive manufacturing and electronics continue to be merged together, the excitement around the tech will grow. This all means that soon we may be able to print and prototype not only mechanical parts from our desktop, but also integrated electronics parts. We’re beginning to see the push to rapidly prototype virtually anything… and this capability could radically alter our training jobs The next age of rapid manufacturing is approaching fast.
Additive manufacturing is well suited for many applications where parts are needed that simply can’t be easily produced using other methods like machining or injection molding.
On method uses a printhead that works on a level flat printing surface by laying down user choice of conductive chemical or material. This functionality is very similar to the way additive manufacturing works and it allows for fast production of custom circuit boards. Given the current way that circuit boards are mass manufactured, this additive technique makes possible one-off iterated designs .
3D printed circuit board technology uses an extruder head that can lay down beads of solder or conductive material on a printing surface in layers. Couple this “wire printing” method with a secondary material head, and manufacturers are slowly gaining the ability to create 3D printed circuit boards with intricate internal wiring.
The advantage to this technique is that a given circuit isn’t constrained by the traditional flat printed circuit board , and can be made to perfectly fit the shape of a given product. Having the ability to design 3D connections in compact spaces is something that is otherwise impossible within the ways that circuit boards are currently produced.
With 3D printing circuit board manufacturing, a drastic change in how electrical engineers see and build projects is beginning to form.
The current state of the additive manufacturing industry lies mostly with mechanical engineers and makers alike. 3D printing and other additive techniques allow engineers to rapidly prototype a given mechanical component or assembly. Even with all of the advancement that has surrounded this industry in recent years, it’s still early in development.
It’s important to point out that there are a few methods that allow for 3D printed circuit boards and are simultaneously fighting to become industry standards.
The world of 3D circuit boards can get a little more complex in both extrusion and material methods, however. Conductive gels are used as well as embedded copper filament. Some machines utilise graphene substrate printing, and living on the cutting edge of experimentation there is even conductive aerogel printing.
There is a small niche in large-scale manufacturing that could allow for circuits to become integrated into materials. But as you can probably guess, any large scale industry adoption of 3D printed circuit boards is far off. Each 3D printing method is undergoing extensive research in their practicality and usability. The idea of manufacturing circuits in this form will change how engineers think about design.
Additive manufacturing and 3D printing have already changed the way that we think about manufacturing. This technology that appeared to be overhyped at first is now carving out its own developed sector in the manufacturing industry.
New manufacturing tech won’t be a solution to all the difficult problems engineers face. 3D printing techniques will also make an emergence in the following product areas primed for future field use:
1. 3D Printed Antennas
The plastic antenna panel and the embedded dielectrics are printed in one go. Rather than trucking or airlifting in antennas for the growing number of connected devices that are appearing on the battlefield, DoD is studying ways to print dielectric antennas, even from non-conductive materials like ceramic or plastic, directly on location. Researchers are working on several different approaches for 3D printing high-frequency circuits and electromagnetic devices.
2. 3D Printing Composites for In-Field Use
3D printing process being developed based on the use of composites, where scientists can engineer advanced composite cement, fiber-reinforced polymers, metal composites and composite ceramic and metal matrices: all of which can be tailored for use in the field.
3. 3D print Biometric Sensors
Like 3D printing antennas, being able to 3D print multi-material electronic circuits opens up the potential for several different applications for “future warfighters”. Researchers at have long envisioned the potential to embed a radio antenna on the side of a soldier’s helmet, or 3D print sensors that monitor status directly onto a weapon or an article of clothing, such as a combat boot.
4. 3D Printed Beachheads with Local Materials
Robot capable of 3D printing objects independently, from materials found on location: We drop a black box in a place where you wouldn’t want to send your soldiers. It could be a dense jungle, the top of a mountain, a dangerous extreme environment, etc. Through a suite of sensors, this manufacturing unit senses what’s around it, what minerals are in the sand, and what trees are around it. It then prints robots to go collect those materials, to collect sap from trees, mud and straw to make bricks. These robots bring those materials back.”
5 3D print Micro Assembly Robots
Magnetically Actuated Micro-Robots for Advanced Manipulation Applications will be used to build smart structures with high-performance mechanics. Thousands of micro-robots manufacture high-quality macro-scale products while providing millimeter-scale structural control. For example, some micro-robots will carry electronic and mechanical components. Some micro-robots will deposit liquids, and others will perform in-situ quality analysis. Mounted to a mobile robotic base, a micro-factory will be able to build parts of practically any size. The micro-robots themselves could also be 3D printed.
6. 3D Printers at Sea
Navy has permanently installed a 3D printer on a warship for the first time. However, the printer aboard the amphibious warship is not used for building replacement parts. The crew has been making many useful things, like a new cap they designed for an oil tank, to model planes to move around their mock-up of the flight deck.
7. 3D printing Metals
Open Manufacturing programmes seek to speed up adoption of metal additive manufacturing for end-use components. While test parts for jets have been developed they are not yet approved for in-flight use.
8. 3D Printing Equipping Prototype
9. Rapid Equipping Force 3D design a prototype solution and upload it to provide inspiration for workshops where Troops will bring virtual blueprints to life by manufacturing 3D prototypes using Expeditionary equipment.
9. 3D Printed Uniforms
Through 3D printing, DoD is studying ways to combine different advanced materials, reduce the number of seams for added comfort and durability, and even create embedded ballistic sections into a single piece of clothing. One alternative and futuristic approach is the Tactical Assault Light Operator Suit.
10. 3D Printed Food
DoD is considering using a 3D printer to make the soldiers’ chow.