Additive manufacturing is drastically changing the way products are made, so what exactly is additive manufacturing? How is additive different from traditional manufacturing? Today I will discuss with you all.
Additive manufacturing is a production method that uses 3D digital models to directly print products. From sports shoes to parts on aerospace rockets, additive manufacturing will create physical objects by stacking special metal materials layer by layer according to sintering, melting, and spraying. Additive manufacturing has a place in the future of manufacturing!
Additive manufacturing is very different from traditional manufacturing. The simplified production method breaks through the limitations of traditional structural design, making it possible to produce complex structures and optimize product performance. This increases manufacturers' production flexibility, shortens production cycles, and brings true innovative thinking into products. With additive manufacturing technology, all kinds of products that used to exist only in the imagination and considered impossible to produce can finally be realized.
Metal 3D Printer DMP Flex 350
The future of additive manufacturing is infinitely broad, but its scalability (scale-up) has been stunted. Many entrepreneurs see the potential for additive to save huge costs, but they also have the following questions: How can additive technology be used to produce thousands of cost-effective products other than prototypes?
In fact, with the advancement of technology, today's metal additive technology has the capability of mass production, and the products manufactured by it can already be compared with traditional manufacturing in terms of performance, production efficiency or production scale, and the production cost is also a significant reduction. Below we present four of the most significant advantages:
1. Solve the problem of talent shortage and reduce production costs
Compared with traditional production methods, additive manufacturing can effectively reduce production costs and barriers to entry. For example, CNC machining, which is widely used in the manufacturing industry, has a global shortage of talents, and its necessary professional operators are a source of heavy labor costs, which is also difficult for small and medium-sized manufacturers to compete with larger scales. An important reason for rivalry.
In contrast, additive manufacturing technology is less demanding for professional operators, because additive equipment is simpler, relatively easy to program, and therefore less expensive to operate in the long run. In addition, additive manufacturing breaks through the geographical limitations of production. You can program and design in Switzerland and send it to domestic or other regions for production, which is difficult to achieve in the traditional manufacturing field that requires many fixtures.
2. Quick replacement between different manufacturing operations
Replacing machined parts in traditional manufacturing is time-consuming and laborious. For example, CNC machines often take tens of minutes to hours to replace parts. Additive manufacturing, on the other hand, can build multiple products at once, allowing for truly seamless replacements between different manufacturing operations, and each replacement can be reduced to minutes at most.
At the same time, the flexible production of enterprises also means that the time and money cost required to produce spare parts are greatly reduced. In traditional CNC machining or injection molding production, it is often necessary to overproduce products by 10% to account for losses and scrapped parts that occur in the process. With additive technology, additional parts can be produced on demand at the moment of loss, avoiding waste caused by overproduction.
3. Rapid response to capacity surge
Whether it's producing consumer electronics parts or basketball shoes, the surge in demand is often a love-hate relationship for manufacturers. This is because the supply chain of traditional processing is complex and lengthy, and it is difficult to instantly expand production capacity by requiring each link to adapt to the surge in demand, thus increasing the difficulty of rapid response.
In contrast, additive manufacturing technology has low requirements for molds and fixtures, thus reducing manufacturers' dependence on the supply chain. Additive-manufactured products reduce the time it takes to go from design to manufacture, accelerate time-to-market, and get new products into the hands of consumers faster.
4. Realize personalized production
With the trend of personal characteristics, consumers' personalized needs for products. Without the use of molds, additive manufacturing allows companies to quickly manufacture personalized products at a lower cost. Its advantages of small batch production fit perfectly with the ever-changing demands of modern consumers.
For example, to produce a limited-edition car with individual features like the one pictured above, additive manufacturing would enable the production of small batches of parts to deliver what customers want in the most cost-effective way.
With the innovation of additive manufacturing technology, the threshold for enterprises to adopt and apply additive will be greatly reduced, thereby meeting the purpose of shortening the production cycle of enterprises to meet customer needs. With the help of additive manufacturing, the traditional manufacturing methods and the products produced will have a qualitative improvement and a breakthrough in design thinking, and this day is just around the corner.