Chapter 1

Seeing How 3D Printers Fit into Modern Manufacturing

In This Chapter

Embracing additive manufacturing

Defining additive manufacturing

Contrasting traditional manufacturing

Recycling and planned obsolescence

Exploring the application of 3D printing

An amazing transformation is currently under way in manufacturing, across nearly all types of products — a transformation that promises to remake the future into a sustainable and personally customized environment. In this fast-approaching future, everything we need — from products to food, and even our bodies themselves — can be replaced or reconstructed rapidly and with very minimal waste. This is not the slow change of progress from one generation of iPhone to the next, but instead a true revolution, mirroring the changes that introduced the world to the Industrial Age and then bought light and electricity to our homes and businesses.

This will not be a “bloodless coup” by any means; any truly fundamental change that spans all aspects of the global economy will, by its nature, be disruptive. But traditional inefficient ways of producing the next year's model will surely give way to entirely new opportunities impossible to imagine before. The technology behind this transformation is referred to as additive manufacturing, 3D printing, or direct digital manufacturing.

By whatever name, in the coming decade this technology will be used to construct everything from houses to jet engines, airplanes, food, and even replacement tissues and organs made from your own cells! Every day new applications of 3D printing are being discovered and developed all over the world. And even in space: NASA is testing designs that will function in zero gravity, on the airless moon, and even to support human exploration of other planets like Mars. (See Figure 1-1 for a glimpse.) Hold on tight, because in the chapters ahead we cover a lot of incredibly new and fantastic technologies — and before the end, we show you how you can get involved in this amazing transformation yourself by building and using a 3D printer at home.

Figure 1-1: A line drawing of NASA's planned 3D-printed lunar construction.

Embracing Additive Manufacturing

So, what is “additive manufacturing,” you might ask? Additive manufacturing is a little like the “replicators” in the Star Trek universe, which allow the captain to order “Tea, Earl Grey, hot” and have a cup filled with liquid appear fully formed and ready for consumption. We are not quite to that level, but today's 3D printers perform additive manufacturing by taking a 3D model of a object stored in a computer, translating it into a series of very thin layers, and then building the object one layer at a time, stacking up material until the object is ready for use.

 3D printers are much like the familiar desktop printer you already use at work or in your home to create copies of documents transmitted electronically or created on your computer, except that a 3D printer creates a solid three-dimensional object out of a variety of materials, not just a simple paper document.

Since the time of Johannes Gutenberg, creating multiple printed documents has brought literacy to the world. Today, when you click the Print button in a word processor application, you merge the functions of writers, stenographers, editors (spellcheck), layout, illumination (coloring and adding in images), and press reproduction all into a single task, and with the click of a few more buttons, you can post the document you create onto the Internet and allow it to be shared, downloaded, and printed out by others all over the world.

3D printing does the exact same thing for objects: Designs and virtual 3D models for physical objects can be shared, downloaded, and then printed out into physical form. It's hard to imagine what Johannes Gutenberg would have made of that.

Defining additive manufacturing

Why is additive manufacturing called “additive?” Additive manufacturing works by bringing the design of an object — its shape — into a computer model, then dividing that model into separate layers that can stack atop another to form the final object. It reimagines a three-dimensional object as a series of stackable layers that, when added together, forms the finished object. (See Figure 1-2.) Whether this object is a tea cup or a house, the process starts with the base layer and then builds up each additional layer until the full object has been completed.

Figure 1-2: A line drawing of how 3D printing works.

My children did this before they ever saw my first 3D printer. They discovered they could use crackers and cheese spray for more than just a snack — they could build towers and grand designs simply by layering crackers and cheese on top of each other. These edible structures show the potential in additive manufacturing. Each cracker was given a personalized application of cheese to spell out names, draw designs, and even to build shapes and support tiny pyramids. The resulting snacks were both unique and also customized to exactly the design each child wanted.

3D printers build up layers of material in a few different ways: Either they fuse liquid polymers with a laser, bind small granular particles using a laser or a liquid binding material, or they extrude melted materials out like a tube of toothpaste squeezed onto a toothbrush. However, 3D printers perform their additive manufacturing using many more materials than just toothpaste or cheese spray. They can fabricate items using photo-curable plastic polymers, melted plastic filament, metal powders, concrete, and many other types of material — including biological cells that can form amazingly complex structures to replace, repair, and even augment our own bodies.

Just as the rings of a tree show the additive layers of growth to the tree each year, additive manufacturing builds up objects one layer at a time. In this way we can create a small plastic toy, a whole car, and very soon an entire house (with all of its furnishings), or even complete airplanes with interlocking parts. Research today on conductive materials suggests that wires will soon become just another part of the additive manufacturing process, by allowing them to be printed directly into an object itself instead of having to be installed later.

Contrasting traditional manufacturing

How does this additive manufacturing compare to the traditional methods of production that have worked just fine since the First Industrial Revolution in the 1700's transformed manufacturing from hand production to automated production, using water and steam to drive machine tools? Why do we need to take up another disruptive technological shift after the Second Industrial Revolution in the 1800's transformed the world through the increased use of steam-powered vehicles and the factories that made mass manufacturing possible? Today, we stand at the opening moment of the next transformation, a Third Industrial Revolution, where mass manufacturing and global transfer of bulk goods will be set aside in favor of locally-produced and highly personalized individual production fitting society's transition to a truly global phase of continuous self-upgrade and incremental local innovation.

The First Industrial Revolution's disruption of society was so fundamental that governments had to pass laws to protect domestic wool textile production in England against new power-woven cotton textiles being imported from the East Indies. The spinning jenny and automated flyer-and-bobbin looms allowed a small number of people to weave hundreds of yards of fabric every week, whereas hand weavers took months to card plant fibers or shorn hair, spin the material into thread, and then weave many spools of thread into a few yards’ worth of fabric. Suddenly, these new industrial technologies like the automated loom shown in Figure 1-3 were putting weavers out of work, sparking the formation of the Luddite movement that tried to resist this transformation. Fortunately, the capability for the new technologies to provide clothes to families eventually won that argument and the world was transformed.

Figure 1-3: An example from past industrial revolutions.

A few years later, the Second Industrial Revolution's disruption of society was even more pronounced, because automation provided alternatives not limited by the power of a man or horse, and steam power freed even massive industrial applications from their existence alongside rivers and water wheels, and allowed them to become mobile. The difficulties traditional workers faced with these new technologies are embodied in the tale of folk hero John Henry, chronicled in the powerful folk song “The Ballad of John Henry,” who proved his worth by outdigging a steam-driven hammer by a few inches’ depth before dying from the effort. This song and many like it were heralded as proof of mankind's value in the face of automation, and yet the simple fact that the steam hammer could go on day after day without need for food or rest, long after John Henry was dead and gone, tells the tale of why that disruption has been adopted as the standard in the years since.

Here at the edge of the transformation that may one...