Theoretically, how far could the technologies involved in this advance?
My understanding is that 3D printing of electronics, pharmaceuticals, machinery parts, cars, homes, etc has been done. I’ve heard people claim 3D printing will revolutionize manufacturing the way digital storage and the internet did for physical media.
I believe one professor at MIT was trying to work on a 3D printing lab where all the machinery in the lab could be made in a pre existing 3D printing lab.
I assume some things will never be able to be 3D printed at home. So could we reach an economy where several items in stores are not the finished products, but are instead the components that can’t be 3D printed, and people print the rest of the product at home, then finish assembly? Maybe you 3D print a car but certain parts like the tires you still have to buy.
What % of manufactured goods could eventually be replaced with 3D printing from raw materials as the technology matures?
I recently bought a 3D printer and I’m having a lot of fun with it. It does have limits though, and there is no way in which it, however mature it gets, can ever replace a production line making injection molded plastic parts.
3D printing is great for making one-off custom parts. It can be used to make molds and jigs for that production line for instance.
I am having a lot of fun, designing things I can’t buy, then making them. That’s a great niche use case, but will it ever become common?
I can see 3D printing, and custom manufacturing techniques be useful for manufacturing support, scientific and artistic endevours, that kind of thing. I don’t really see any significant percentage of mass manufacturing ever being done with 3D printing. No matter how good it gets, mass production techniques like injection molding, continuous casting, and stuff will always be an order of magnitude cheaper.
If you need less than 10 of something, 3D printing or something like it could be a good choice. Otherwise it will probably be more cost effective to set up a production line.
I was assuming 3D printing now is about where personal computers and the internet were in the 80s. Mostly a thing for hobbyists and do it yourself types. But eventually the technology will become user friendly enough that almost everyone has one.
I’m sure it will. It’s cheap enough now that you can get a basic one for a couple of hundred bucks, and it doesn’t require much technical knowledge to operate.
It’s good for one off and craft stuff, but it won’t be the equal of professional production stuff any time soon, if ever.
I think the biggest challenge for a while to come is going to be a way for non-technical people to design their own projects. People see intricate and detailed things online and think ‘Neat! I’d like to do that!’ without realizing that most of those things were designed by people with years of experience.
Mature 3D printing–that is to say, additive manufacturing in its ultimate form–is molecular assembly. Once we have that, the only reason not to 3D print a thing is cost. It’ll still likely be cheaper to manufacture bulk parts using traditional techniques.
However, once we have molecular assembly we may not want bulk material parts. Smart matter that can change properties on the fly will be too useful to ignore.
This is all a very long time off, but you did ask for “maturity”…
Fused deposition modeling, stereolithography, metal laser sintering, electron beam melting, and so on are also unrelated technologies. What they have in common is that they’re all types of additive manufacturing: adding material to an object until it has the form you want. Molecular manufacturing is the end state of this idea.
It’s not clear now that we’ll see continuous improvements all the way to that point. Will we get metallic 3D printing with micrometer precision, for instance? Hard to say. But I’d definitely lump all these in the same basic category.
Basically somewhat like paper printing is like now. People will have basic 3D printers at home or you can take a USB drive to Walgreens for a few prints on a self-service machine, but for complex, better quality printing or bigger multi-part jobs, you head down to a Kinkos-type place, give them a file and have them do a run of the item on professional level equipment for your small business/school/party project. And then you’ll have the sketchy, strip-mall places that will make sex toys, drug paraphernalia and weapons.
The hype bubble of everyone having a 3D printing at home and factories becoming obsolete burst a couple years ago if not earlier.
Not going to happen. ever.
It’s always going to be more efficient and cheaper to buy mass produced stuff which will always be more suited to the task than stuff made to fit the limitations of a generic 3D printer. 3D printers are good for people that need to and can design custom objects, that takes skill, designing for 3D printing is another layer of skill over that, operating a 3D printer yet another layer. The average person has neither the need or the skills to make it worth it.
I’ve been using 3D printers for the last 5 years at least and I could count on my fingers the number of times I’ve printed something for normal home use, and when I did it was invariably something I designed from scratch for a very specific function. Every now and then someone will ask me if I can print something for them, an adapter for a washing machine drain, a handle for an electric bicycle battery, things like that, useful but a situation that presents itself once a year if that.
Complex things like electronics are out of the question, chip manufacturing plants have a price tag on the hundreds of millions and even billions for a reason.
Yeah the idea that people are going to print whatever they need from home is nuts. Think about what kind of materials you’d have to keep on hand just in case what you wanted to print requires it. It’d be like trying to stock a kitchen to make every recipe in the world.
What I could see happening is that large 3d printing facilities could pop up around the country and once you order something, it is printed and delivered to your door in about an hour.
It could also be a solution to some of the challenges the developing world faces with manufacturing and transportation.
If the technology advances to the point that you can 3D print a metal gun that almost never blows up in your hand, that’s going to be significant. There’s already an “80% receiver” and “ghost gun” market out there, as well as plans for making improvised guns from hardware store components. Even if at first the printers are expensive and the quality mediocre, I could see an enterprising person making a profit cranking out shoot-and-toss guns for the street trade. If the quality is ok-to-decent and the cost low enough for true aficionados to get involved, then it will start to take off. If it comes to the point where anyone can buy an adequate 3D printer at Home Depot and programming it to make a gun is as simple as downloading a file, it will be revolutionary.
Cody Wilson, founder of Defense Distributed, said that he deliberately chose guns as a showcase for the technology because he wanted to demonstrate the potential for 3D printing to bypass all central control of manufactured objects, the way text printing ultimately defeated national and church censorship. Wilson sees the technology as libertarian.
REALLY mature would be being able to reduce any feedstock matter to a De Broglie wave function and then instantly convert it into whatever you want like a Star Trek replicator. None of this dinking around with atoms like Lego blocks!
The thing about 3D printing (or even CNC machining), no matter how mature it gets, is that it takes, and I bet always will take, orders of magnitude more time and energy than techniques like continuous casting or injection molding.
I just made a couple of cool little gadgets on my 3D printer. They took about 10 hours of print time, and several thousand watt-hours of energy. I can see advances in the technology that might reduce that by arbitrary amounts. No matter how cheap 3D printing gets, standard manufacturing techniques could make the same thing much more cheaply.
Of course, the cool thing was that I designed exactly what I wanted, because I couldn’t buy them anywhere at any price, and I got just what I wanted.
I have long presumed that increased parallelism of one form or another will happen. And probably sooner than one could predict right now.
With a lot of print “heads”, the speed increases dramatically. The first big improvement would be a 1d row of “heads”. Then 2d.
Another approach to parallelism is the laser-hardening epocy methods. With a lot of lasers you could really speed things up. So almost 3d in print parallelism.
It’s like how in assembling electronics we went from 1 component at a time, to PC boards with multiple components added in quick succession and soldered all at once to integrated circuits where everything was “built” in parallel.
There is also amazing stuff going on using inkjet-style printheads. Including biological components.
Mature doesn’t mean the end, it’s the beginning. It means that the technology has become useful and practical and that happened years ago. 3D printing is used in lots of commercial applications already, it is a mature technology.
That doesn’t mean it won’t continue to mature, it will continue to improve and find more uses. It will take a very long time before it can completely replace cast metal parts, or make new organs for people, or build nano-machines that reproduce and take over the world, but that will come in time. For the time being it is being used wherever it is economically viable, and it’s not likely to become more economically viable over time, it will be best suit for niche applications and small quantity production until such time that we want things that can only be made with 3D printing. Otherwise the operational costs of 3D printing are not going to improve much, the materials and machines do not cost much. They could certainly get faster, but there are limits to their speed before other technologies are more efficient, and it usually only matters with high volume production.
Regarding the discussion above about “multiple print heads”. My 3D printer is an Elgoo Mars, which doesn’t use a print head. It prints a whole layer at a time by exposing liquid resin to what is essentially a computer screen that emits UV light. It just displays a picture of what the layer should look like, and the resin hardens in that configuration. It’s much faster than printers that use a moving print head, and the resolution is great (47 microns per layer).
The biggest issue I have with 3D printers is you can’t print arbitrary shapes. Each voxel on each layer has be connected to a voxel on the underlying layer, or it falls apart. Depending on the shape, this can require adding complicated support structures that then have to be manually cut away after the printing is done.