global industry – Malta 3D Printing

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ricksmith/2015/06/15/3d-printing-is-about-to-change-the-world-forever/

3D Printing Is About To Change The World Forever

I believe, along with a growing number of leaders around the world, that 3D printing will change the way things are produced more in this century than the industrial revolution did over the last 300 years.

Consider these two recent events:

A little over a year ago, a young Indonesian man named Arie Kurniawan participated in an open innovation challenge hosted by the global industrial company GE. The goal was to redesign the bracket that attaches a jet engine to an airplane wing. Arie’s design beat out over 1,000 other submissions, which was surprising to almost everyone. For one, Arie had absolutely no experience whatsoever with industrial manufacturing. None. Secondly, he had used a completely new design technique enabled by industrial 3D printing technology. But Aries’s bracket worked perfectly. It passed every one of the rigorous end use industrial tests for durability, stress and reliability.

And it weighed 83% less than the part it replaced.

At about the same time, halfway around the world, GE’s radical new fuel injection system for a jet engine first emerged from a industrial 3D metal printer. The previous system had 21 separate parts, which needed to be produced, shipped to the same location, and then assembled. The new 3D printed system had only one. It was five times stronger, and contributed to an increase in fuel efficiency of an astonishing 15%! That a savings of over $1 million dollars per year on fuel. On every single airplane that uses the new system.

Reports of these two startling events quickly spread throughout GE and beyond. While certainly no one expected these single parts to have an immediate impact on the company’s overall financial performance, the implications of these two events were disarmingly clear.

If 3D printing enabled individual parts to be redesigned with such massive improvements in efficiency, what possibilities existed for the companies’ other millions of parts?
If someone with no training in industrial production could so impact a company stocked with top engineers, what were the implications for the current global workforce?
If the new technology could reduce 21 component parts to one, what did this mean for the future of GE’s longstanding parts producers?
If these parts could now be cost effectively produced in the United States, what did this mean for the global supply chain?

Even bigger, what if these new technologies could be used to redesign not only a few parts, but an entire airplane? Could we envision reducing the entire weight of a plane by 5%, 10%, even 20%? An outcome like this would not simply result in a financial uplift for companies like GE—it would change the economics of an entire industry!

In fact, it would change every industry.

forbes.com

by Rick Smith | JUN 15, 2015 @ 2:05 PM

http://www.rt.com/business/253785-3d-printing-industry-growth/

Reuters / Pichi Chuang

Wave of future: 3D printing industry to quadruple by 2020

3D printing can produce almost everything from human stem cells to a car,and is at its most popular in the industry’s 29–year history. It has grown by 35.2 percent in 2014 and is expected to become a $20.2 billion global industry by the end of the decade.

The global industry for 3D printing, or additive manufacturing as it is sometimes called, was worth $4.1 billion last year, following a 34.9 percent growth on 2013, according to Wohlers Report 2015. The industry has experienced a compound annual growth rate of 33.8 percent over the last three years.

It’s impossible to find another industry with more than 25 years of experience that could have such kind of growth, says consultancy founder Terry Wohlers, who has been tracking the growth of the additive manufacturing industry since the 1980s.

The 3D printing technology industry began in 1986, and was worth just $295 million in 1995. The worldwide market for 3D printers, associated materials and services is expected to grow by 56 percent this year to $5.2 billion compared with $3.3 billion in 2014, according to the data from research firm Canalys.

“As we expected, the 3D printing market has grown substantially over the past few years. We have seen improving print speeds, a wider range of materials and new forms of additive manufacturing methods,” Joe Kempton, Canalys research analyst says. He pointed to the increase in vendors from Asia, which is taking on dominant existing markets, such as Germany and the US.

3D printing is a technology which allows designing objects using software and then manufacturing using a layering technique. It is a prototyping process where a real object is created from a digital 3D-model, which can be a scan of 3D images or can be drawn using computer-assisted design or simply can be downloaded from the internet. People in 3D printing usually say “If you can draw it, you can make it”.

An estimated 526 additive manufacturing (AM) systems were sold in 1995 from 15 system manufacturers located in the US, Germany, and Japan. In 2014, 49 system manufacturers in 13 countries produced and sold an estimated 12,850 industrial 3D printing systems. Last year hundreds of mostly small companies worldwide produced and sold nearly 140,000 desktop 3D printers that sell for less than $5,000 each.

Promising future

3D printing, combined with the internet, can rewrite history say experts. Now everything can be downloaded and printed at home. Additive manufacturing allows people to print real-life products and part replacements in their home or office. The only requisite is a 3D printer which allows printing the object in three dimensions, and printing materials such as plastics, waxes, ceramic, and metal. However, the process is a long one, it takes hours or even days to print a 3D model and often a tiny error can make the entire print useless. The high cost of a 3D printer is also a big drawback for the individual home user; home 3D printers today vary in price from £300 to £3,000.

The 3D printing revolution is expected to continue and to challenge not only traditional manufacturing but also to have a remarkable effect on automotive, medical, and other industries. Sixty-seven percent of manufacturers are already using 3D printing according to PriceWaterhouseCoopers.

One of the most important applications of 3D printing is in the medical industry. With 3D printing, surgeons can produce mockups of parts of their patient’s body which need to be operated on. Almost everything from aerospace components to toys will be possible to build with the help of 3D printers. 3D printing is also used for jewelry and art, architecture, fashion design, art, architecture and interior design.

3D printers will continue to fall in price and improve in speed and quality. The aerospace, automotive, and medical sectors will continue to be the major revenue drivers going forward over the next five years, according to Canalys.

With 3D printing, companies can now experiment with new ideas and numerous design variations with no extensive time or tooling expense. General Electric, Boeing, and BMW have already invested millions of dollars into the technology which is considered by some as the most interesting of our time.

References:

rt.com

http://www.rt.com/business/253785-3d-printing-industry-growth/