What is Additive Manufacturing?
Additive manufacturing adds material layer by layer to build the desired workpiece. Whereas cutting methods like milling or electric discharge machining are subtractive processes, which remove material from the fabricated item.
What's the Difference Between Additive Manufacturing and 3D Printing?
The most famous and topical of additive manufacturing disciplines is 3D printing, now an essential aspect of many shops and facilities. It's theoretically simple: a printer lays down layer after layer of material until it achieves the desired design.
Many of the other additive methods, like extrusion, binder jetting, and directed energy deposition are altered versions of what most people know as 3D printing. They rely on melting wires, filaments, powders, or polymers and adding layers of liquefied material until completion. Vat polymerization does this, then uses UV light to cure the layers of resin. Wire arc additive manufacturing does this with pre-meditated precision, tracing a path and laying down more and more stuff in a programmed pattern.
Yet one strategy does away with all the melting. Cold spray additive manufacturing (CSAM) creates new parts and adds features to existing parts. CSAM uses a compressed gas stream to spitball particles onto a substrate at high velocity, layering the particles thinly to form a coating or thickly to gradually develop an entire workpiece.
The primary 3D printing processes: FDM vs. PolyJet
Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) is also known as Fused Filament Fabrication (FFF) because the FDM nomenclature has since been trademarked. Whatever you call it, this is your basic 3D-printing method and the most used at the consumer level. It utilizes thermoplastics, plastics that become malleable at higher temperatures. The 3D printing device melts materials like the popular PVA, ABS, PLA, and nylon, then extrudes them through a nozzle.
On the industrial side, the preferred printing method is PolyJet 3D printing. A PolyJet printer lays down layers of liquid photopolymers, or polymers that respond to light. When these resins are subjected to UV light, molecules known as photoinitiators turn that light energy into chemical energy, and the printed part becomes solid.
PolyJet is prized for its ability to efficiently combine materials, create prototypes, and achieve custom parts that may be flexible, durable, or both. This printing method can also deliver the tightest tolerances and craziest geometries necessary in the medical, defense, aerospace, and energy sectors, to name just a few.
A Technology With Limitless Future Potential
3D printing could theoretically bring about much progress in housing people worldwide. Printing homes could reduce overall building costs or help builders deal with labor shortages. As in the Phoenix metropolitan area, where Habitat for Humanity has printed two homes in Tempe, AZ.
The house-printing device is akin to an immense, industrial soft serve ice cream machine. It straddles the building site as its extruder travels along a rail, laying down a "line of wet concrete a few inches thick." It continues layering concrete until it erects the inner and outer walls of a 1,700 square-foot three-bedroom home.
But additive manufacturing isn't limited to 3D printing. Nor is it limited to inert constructions. It's prodigiously promising in the medical field, where doctors "print" body tissues like organs—perfectly biocompatible organs for transplants, made from a patient's own cells.
Or bone tissue for osteoporosis sufferers. Or even commercial health products, like a futuristic, minty lozenge that adds the dental enamel that gives our teeth their lustrous sheen (link to bioengineering blog). While in the energy sector, 3D printing could provide the most efficient nuclear power plants yet.
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