3D printing is an incredibly versatile form of manufacturing, allowing creators, designers, and even enthusiasts to bring their products to life without a major time or financial investment. It provides a wide array of exciting opportunities throughout all fields, professions, and walks of life. From personal use to prototyping to full-scale manufacturing of products, 3D printing and additive manufacturing as a whole can change the way we approach everyday life – and it’s already starting to.
A 3D printer can help investors to create a rapid prototype of an idea, cutting development time and costs down extensively. They can also be used to create artificial tissue to help heal injuries or even to create fully-functional machines that rival other traditional forms of manufacturing.
And while these implementations are not quite perfected yet, the advancements made in recent years paint a positive outlook for the future of 3D printing.
The Future of 3D Printing
One of the limitations of wide-scale 3D printing is manufacturing times. Creating products from scratch through additive manufacturing (as opposed to reductive manufacturing) means that you’re often going to have to create more than you would be able to reduce through other processes. This can lead to longer production periods that are prohibitive for large-scale manufacturing with a single machine. Also, current printers are limited in the type of material they can use as filament, limiting the scope of the creations that can be made.
However, as time progresses and the field expands, it is expected that machines will become faster through more efficient software and hardware, achieve greater capacity for hardware within machines (such as multiple extruders of different types), and be able to integrate multiple material types into a single creation. These can help to cut down on production times and increase the complexity of projects that printers can handle, allowing them to be used in more exciting and large-scale applications such as in-the-field production with portable printers.
With 3D printing, the possibilities are endless!
