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May 8.2019,Philippines—Plenty of innovative and intriguing technologies and processes are swarming into today’s global manufacturing industry, and one of the seemingly most popular and influential among them, not only to the consumers but also to the industry at large, is additive manufacturing, better known as 3D printing.

Unlike traditional or subtractive manufacturing which removes or cuts material from a solid block of material to produce the product, additive manufacturing is a process in which products are produced by adding layers of material.

Being the total opposite of traditional manufacturing, additive manufacturing is understandably creating a disruption and presenting alternatives to global manufacturing processes, especially to the product design and development. Here is a closer look at how 3D printing is changing the global manufacturing industry.

Product Design and Development

As technology continues to advance, the limits to designing and developing an object is slowly becoming nonexistent. With 3D printing, product design and development teams are now freer to envision more complex geometric shapes and create objects that they never could with traditional manufacturing.

Among the first advocates of 3D printing, the aerospace industry has already seen major benefits from it. With 3D printing, Researchers at Monash University, Australia were able to develop the world’s first 3D-printed jet engine in 2015 which opens the door to the production of cheaper, lighter, and more fuel-efficient jets.

Product Testing

Product design and development is only one of the two main manufacturing processes that greatly benefit from 3D printing. The other one is rapid prototyping. Prototyping is the creation of an initial product sample to be used for design testing, cost clarifications, demos, feedback gathering, and more. It can help manufacturers learn more about the most appropriate designs for their products, but doing it often and repeatedly can be very costly and time-consuming.

Fortunately, by being a digital additive manufacturing process, 3D printing presents a cheaper way of producing prototypes, as well as allowing designers to make changes on the design as easy as one mouse click.

Production Time and Cost

3D printing does not only allow global manufacturing companies to be more creative and experimentative on their product design but also helps them speed up the product’s time to market which could greatly be advantageous to the product’s market competitiveness. Moreover, global manufacturing companies could allocate the time they saved in production because of 3D printing on their other efforts and processes that may need more attention.

Along with the faster production, 3D printing also enables global manufacturing companies to save on material costs since it only uses materials inputted into it to produce an object.

Environment

Although the rapid technological advancements bring many benefits to the global manufacturing industry, it also fuels consumerism which is a social and economic order that encourages the purchase of goods and services in ever-greater amounts. As the demands for products increases, the need to produce such goods also increases. Unfortunately, as the title of the 2004 National Geographic article Earth Suffers as Consumerism Spreads suggest, consumerism may accelerate climate change.

3D printing, however, being an additive manufacturing strategy, reduces wasting of raw materials which can contribute to lesser carbon emission. Furthermore, some 3D printers can use recycled materials like wood to create new objects.

Some may see 3D printing as a negative invention for the global manufacturing industry, thinking it could replace human workers or lead consumers to produce their own products at their own home, which is totally possible. However, the industry is not only home to cutting-edge technologies, but also to expert knowledge and processes.

Instead of being a threat, 3D printing should be utilized to push the global manufacturing industry to go beyond its limits as we move towards the future.