What is 3D Printing?
3D printing is an additive manufacturing process that makes a physical object with accumulating material together from a three-dimensional digital model. It is the opposite of subtractive manufacturing which is cutting out a piece of material with machines. Nowadays, you can print rubber, plastic, aluminum, steel and copper for different applications.
What’s the advantage of 3D Printing
3D printing is more and more popular today. Do you know the advantages compare to other traditional manufacturing processes?
1. Freedom of Design
Industry designers have a lot of good ideas. A big problem is it might be very difficult to make. 3D printing enables designers to think creatively – you can easily get what you can imagine without considering wall thickness, under-cuts, uneven walls, deep-narrow recesses, or other circumstances restricted by manufacturing methods. Think Broader!
2. Shorten your development time
There are no molds or toolings needed. It reduces development time from 5 weeks to 1 or 2 days if your original plan was to build a plastic mold or metal die to verify your design. When you improve your design, you just need another 1 or 2 days to print a beta sample. Product development has never been so easy!
3. Cost Effective
You don’t need to pay for the molds, and the cost of changing the molds at the product development stage. There are a variety of different materials you can pick for your products – rubber, plastic, steel, and copper. You don’t even need a fixture or jig during the manufacturing process. You pay for what is on your hands!
Once you get into the mass production stage, for example, if you want to make 10K parts per month, 3D printing is not a suitable process anymore.
4. Environment Friendly
Traditional subtractive manufacturing for example CNC machining removes a great amount of material from the initial block or bar to make a useful part. That process results in a high percentage sometimes can be over 60% waste of the material. There is almost no material waste!
3D printers accumulate material pixel by pixel, or layer by layer strictly driven by your 3D model in the database. That means less energy waste for making the raw material and less pollution during the manufacturing process.
5. Quality Consistency
Usually, the traditional manufacturing process requires multiple steps to make a part, or even requires switching machines and operators to make it. There is more chance that errors can occur when you switch different machines or processes. On the other hand, regardless of how complex the parts are, 3D printer makes parts in one step under a one-time setup. Under some circumstances, the dimensional accuracy is not as high as CNC machining, but it is always very consistent.
How to pick proper 3D Printing process?
There are a variety of different 3D printing technology available for example SLA, SLS, FDM, MFJ, and DLP.
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