ocuments to make equally complex items, and 3D printers require less operating skills than injection molding machines. Unskilled manufacturing opens up new business models and can provide people with new ways of producing in remote environments or extreme situations.
6: The additive manufacturing used in 3D printing greatly reduces the complexity of manufacturing.
Subtractive manufacturing is shaping, cutting, and removing raw materials through molds, turning milling, and other machining methods, to finally produce finished products. In contrast to the subtractive manufacturing method, additive manufacturing is the technology of manufacturing solid parts using the gradual accumulation of materials, which turns three-dimensional solids into several two-dimensional planes, and produces them by processing the materials and superimposing them layer by layer, just like building a wall with bricks, adding material layer by layer, and finally forming an object. It is a “bottom-up” manufacturing method that greatly reduces the complexity of manufacturing. This digital manufacturing model does not require complex processes, huge machine tools, and a lot of manpower, and can generate parts of any shape directly from computer graphics data so that manufacturing can extend to a wider range of production people.
7: Unlimited combination of materials, multi-material and multi-color mixing.
Combining different raw materials into a single product is difficult for today’s manufacturing machines because traditional manufacturing machines cannot easily combine multiple raw materials during the cutting or mold-forming process. With the development of multi-material 3D printing technology, we can fuse different raw materials. Previously unmixable raw materials are mixed to form new materials that come in a wide variety of shades with unique properties or functions.
8: Exact entity replication.
Digital music files can be copied endlessly, and the audio quality does not degrade. In the future, 3D printing will extend digital precision to the physical world. Together, scanning technology and 3D printing will increase the resolution of morphological transitions between the physical and digital worlds, allowing us to scan, edit, and copy physical objects to create exact copies or optimize originals.
9: There are no defective products, fully automated production, and no manual participation.
Metal parts manufactured by 3D printing will one day be able to reach or even exceed the level of traditional manufacturing processes, after all, 3D printing is more cost-effective, in the processing of a part, does not need lengthy production lines and complex processing processes, only in a printer can be completed, to minimize the number of failure points, almost eliminate the appearance of defective products, which is difficult to compare with traditional manufacturing technology.
10: Energy saving and environmental protection.
In manufacturing, “low carbon emissions” means a more efficient way of designing and producing energy, while low-carbon manufacturing means reducing the carbon footprint of the entire product life cycle, from product design to production, assembly of parts, transportation, distribution, and final end-of-life disposal. 3D printing can use many types of materials, especially when printing metal, which has more advantages over traditional manufacturing techniques. Almost all metal powder left over from 3D printing can be recycled. In contrast, traditional metal fabrication processes (grinding, machining, or molding) are wasteful, and even 90% of the raw materials are left in the waste by-products using some metal manufacturing processes. For example, manufacturing a 1kg aircraft part consumes up to 15kg of metal raw materials.
