3D printing could reduce raw material needs by 90%(economist.com) |
3D printing could reduce raw material needs by 90%(economist.com) |
FWIW though - the 90% they're referring to is the delta between machining solid parts and printing them. It should be added that this is a rare use-case for 3D printing.
Usually it competes more directly with injection molding technologies that often have better material usage because there is no need for support material - which goes to waste holding up the hollow areas for the types of material-saving lattice structures they're talking about.
Sometimes you can get great savings, but 3D printing isn't a production materials panacea. Let's not even get into how to recycle composite materials (very energy intensive) and photopolymers (you can't).
It's a very exciting time to be living in. I have three printers. The first printed the second. The second printed the third. I've made a number of things which turned from idea to design to prototype within hours to days. Then I tweak, hit print again and I've got production. No tooling, no waiting.
Many lattice structures can still be made using injection molding equipment (far cheaper) or starting with a raw material with such a structure: think of aluminum honeycomb.
I agree 3DP is exciting, but we need to get real about what we're trying to achieve - traditional manufacturing engineers are pretty clever too. Not every STL should be run through a nozzle...
FDM is actually one of the worst methods for 3DP manufacturing because it scales linearly - MakerBot et al use this tech because it's the easiest process to build and makes durable parts from common raw materials.
Use 3D printing instead of milling or whatever for prototype.
Use 3D printing instead of whatever for mass production.
Use 3D printing at point of use.
Simple example: I bought a porcelain teapot a few weeks ago. A few days later we broke the lid. So I bought a new teapot. (The old teapot with the broken lid is sitting on a window sill above the kitchen sink, waiting for glue. A tube of glue costs a substantial fraction of the price of the teapot.)
3D printing could eventually lead to a tectonic shift away from planned obsolescence and disposable culture (which, let's face it, is purely an artifact of mass production).
FYI - we can print in ceramics now - so that lid is replaceable if you've got a file ;-)
I think we are not that far away from a self contained fabricator that turns garbage into everyday plastic parts you need.
It's a little dream I have. :-)
This is where I will shamelessly plug my startup, DesignByRobots. The overview of the technology is here: http://designbyrobots.com/2011/01/17/first-post/
Granted I don't understand why people pay more for branded clothes either.
The first office I ever worked in, as a summer job as a student, was computerised but used them as glorified typewriters in the main. All the master documents were on paper, punched and organised into lever arch files. Backups? What's a backup? Think back to an old office; row upon row upon row of filing cabinets, carefully indexed. I don't think I've seen that in at least 6-7 years, maybe 10.
I can't remember the last time I found a document where the master copy was on paper. Regularly referred to paper copies are almost exclusively annotated working versions which get destroyed at the end of the process. We circulate documents on paper in some contexts but are equally likely to email them to each other, and that's rising - more often than not, paper is a reference copy for a meeting rather than our master copy.
My employer stopped doing printed payslips and went fully electronic over a year ago. I have paperless billing from two utility companies and could set it up with a third, I just haven't got round to it. I rarely print photos any more. I read eBooks probably slightly more than paper books and definitely read online news rather than newspapers, while magazines are tentatively stepping towards full electronic distribution through both websites and tablet apps. I basically don't send or receive letters any more.
Paper won't go completely any more than cars resulted in the extinction of the domesticated horse, but it seems to me it's heading for much the same specialist/luxury niche in the market.
Even once we get a printer that's easy enough for 'normal' people to use (hard) and a way for them to design the prints that go in the machine (hard) and we make them small and reliable enough that it's acceptable for normal people (hard) you _still_ have to have a big vat of plastic or whatever lying around, and feed it into the machine.
We've got a long way to go before 'a printer in every home' is reality, if it ever does.
My thoughts: it's like water. A big pipe of raw materials. Just imagine how long that'd take...
People won't be designing things themselves, they'll be downloading files and then pressing 'print' on their computer. It's like how people share funny pictures, links get sent around and viewed.
I'm also assuming that you're talking about FDM, like the MakerBot/RepRap. If you're talking about a different process, well, then it's different.
I've compiled a list of most cheap printers (slightly out of date, I am going to add more soon): http://punkmanufacturing.com/wiki/
As far as usefulness, the open-source printers are not that different from the cheap commercial machines. A well-tuned RepRap should have comparable accuracy. The printing materials are a lot cheaper, as well as the parts (which you can print) and servicing costs. The commercial printers have better resolution, better materials and better software, at least at the moment, but I think that's going to change.
I'll just leave this here: http://open3dp.me.washington.edu/
Specifically: http://open3dp.me.washington.edu/2009/10/plaster-based-powde...
See how cheap that is? Crazy...
Most of the discussion I see about 3D printers ignores the significant amount of physical effort you have to put into a part if it will be used for anything (and depending on the method, just to see the part).
Now, they're totally right: the home printers have a significantly lower resolution than the professional ones. But unless you're making professional grade parts, you probably don't care, and they use the same materials. (I'm assuming you're making the comparison to other FDM machines.)
I fully agree that you can get lattice structures in a number of processes, but printing is the only reasonable way to get internal, closed lattice structures. And I believe the article was meant to create awareness of a reasonably unknown process, rather than claim that everything else should step aside. Milling, routing, turning and molding aren't going anywhere. But that doesn't make printing any less impressive in the areas it's good at.
FDM scales linearly, which is a good thing and a bad thing. It means you have no cost savings when you make large quantities of the same object, but it also means you have no additional cost to make a different object every time. That's what I think is most exciting about it.
There are also newer processes that are much more expensive. If you're checking out something like an Objet machine, or something like EBM, you're still going to be looking at an upper 5 figures to a mid 6.
The Fab@Home guys are trying out various different materials, since their syringe-based extruder allows more flexibility than the RepRap.
http://fabathome.org/wiki/index.php/Fab%40Home:Materials
As far as cheap materials go, it doesn't get much cheaper than garbage plastic.
Or you could just go here (this is my old startup): http://marketplace.cloudfab.com/fab_facts (click through for every datasheet on every machine and material)
An open source 3d printer design with the goal being to use it to print all the parts for then next printer.
The ONLY purpose of a 3D printer is to produce durable goods. Will there ever be a point at which an average consumer will need such a steady stream of durable goods that a dedicated 3D printer will become a necessity?
I don't need even need a home printer or copier really. The few times a year I actually need one, I can walk around the corner to a Kinko's or use the one at work. This also doesn't compare because a printed document is essentially a custom product designed by myself. And despite the prevalence of home printers, it's still vastly cheaper to print documents using mass production techniques. Unless I'm missing something, I don't see this changing, as durable goods are designed by domain experts and the mechanics behind economies of scale would apply even in the 3D printing realm.
Continued product convergence and ultimately nano-tech will further obsolete the necessity to have the large number of specialized, one-off durable goods required for the average household.
Who says durable? The perfect printer is far away, but once you have one, you can get rid of a dishwasher and washing machine; you would just feed your printer the dirty stuff, and print whatever you need at the moment.
Even better, you could feed your furniture to your printer to make a different set of furniture for a party, or turn your car into a convertible for a week.
We will have to solve the energy problem, first, though.
The lesson being that this technology, like computers, holds nearly unlimited potential and yet it's still too early for us to predict quite how its going to be used.
If you ask someone thoroughly steeped in the status quo what it's good for, he's very likely to think of it as an extension of current economic properties. (faster, cheaper, sooner, more custom, etc.) He might even realize its potential to be "disruptive". That's where the Economist article is.
Once you start publicly speculating where the post-disruptive state might settle, then you become a science fiction author.
Will there ever be a point at which an average consumer will need such a steady stream of durable goods that a dedicated 3D printer will become a necessity?
Hang out outside a busy WalMart or Target some Saturday afternoon. There's your steady stream.
Sure they aren't great enough for everything yet, but there has to be things you can create even with the cheap bots that are good enough to be useful.
I'm excited to see what happens as the patents in this space expire. I'm expecting it to be similar to what happened with steam engines.
First catch your hare indeed....
The energy implications of shredding and remanufacturing essentially the same items rather than cleaning them just makes me shudder. That really can't be efficient by any definition.
Ever had something plastic melted (and burned) by the dishwasher? Why not just melt all of it and avoid dumping all the energy in that steaming water down the drain?
The other side which I should have considered before is that if the purpose of this is cleaning (as was originally suggested), reducing the item to parts to reassemble without first cleaning it will result in contaminated build components and a lower quality physical product, but with the contamination spread liberally through the item rather than being on the surface where it can be more easily cleaned away.
What if instead of a water heater you had a plastic heater in your house? What if it had some section where the temp was high enough to kill organisms or used other means?
Still it seems like I'd want to give them a quick rinse-off first.
Perhaps everyone's eating utensils will end up some shade of brown. :-P People would likely want some very dark pigments added. Or "junior! we told you not to put Froot Loops in the dishmelter again..."
Or maybe the stuff just gets hauled off for recycling where it can be re-purified efficiently in large scale processes.