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Metal Additive manufacturing, or Metal 3D printing as it is referred to, has the potential to make innovative products with spectacular gains in performance and efficiency: offering not just production cost savings, but also benefits during the lifetime of use of the product. Industries such as aerospace, medical, automotive, oil & gas, mould & die and consumer products can all benefit from light weight components that are optimised or adapted for their application, freed from conventional production constraints. So why aren't there more metal 3D printed products out there?
So, below are the various barriers which stand in the way of using Metal 3D printing as the primary source to fabricate products.
1) Costs:
This is an obvious one but in more ways than you may know. While the capital cost of industrial grade 3D printers is still proving to be a barrier for many SMEs, the exorbitant, usually hidden, running costs are an even greater obstacle. Pretty much without exception, cost transparency is what users, and potential users, want and need. Costs can be classified as equipment costs and manufacturing costs. However, with an increase in quantity of production, the manufacturing costs will drop significantly and will in turn justify ROI on the equipment cost. Hence, costs being one of the factors barring the use of metal 3D printing is quite arguable.
2) Materials:
The materials issue continues to be a limitation for design engineers and manufacturing engineers when it comes to 3D printing for prototyping applications. Higher performing materials would be a big step towards uptake if costs can be kept down. Typical 3D printing materials such as ABS and PLA suffer from being quite weak, which limits their usefulness for functional prototyping. But with advancement in this technology, metal 3D printers have overcome most of these limitations and are available with a wide variety of processing materials, including those which are difficult to process using traditional methods.
3) Accuracy & Surface Finish:
The problem is that high accuracy is possible with some of the 3D printing processes, which quite legitimately boast extremely fine, impressive tolerances, but the parts that these processes produce are extremely fragile and next to useless for functional testing. When strength and robustness are built into the parts, surface finish is sacrificed and requires specific skills and many man-hours to finish the part to acceptable levels. But with metal 3D printers it is possible to obtain near net shaped parts with close accuracy and repeatability which nullify the above claims.
4) Full Colour Capabilities:
The need of the market lies in creating aesthetically realistic prototypes and fully manufactured parts that require little or no finishing. But with the advent of full colour 3D printing capabilities, people have now seen the potential of colour, and as more and more have realized the benefits of it, it has become something many 3D printing users now want, expect or demand.
5) Strength & Robustness:
The need to achieve optimum strength and robustness in comparison to traditional manufacturing processes is one of the most talked about and doubted aspects of additive manufacturing when it comes to utilize 3D printing technology to its full capability. With significant breakthroughs in the metal printing industry the parts fabricated using metal 3D printing technology have showed significant results in terms of impact strength and functional usability.
6) Lack of expertise and/or training among workforce/employees:
Organizations worldwide are still not accepting to the use of 3D printing technology as an alternative over the traditional methods of manufacturing. In order to overcome these challenges, we believe the industry must change the conversation from emphasizing additive manufacturing’s technical benefits to overall business value. Companies need to not only identify applications and parts to build with 3D printing, but look at their manufacturing strategy as a whole to see how the technology can enable innovation and add value to overall operations. Instead of finding products that fit the technology, make the technology fit the product and business model. This change in thinking needs to happen at the leadership level. Implementing additive manufacturing for true business value affects multiple areas beyond just design and engineering.
7) Lack of in-house additive manufacturing resources:
As the use of metal 3D printing is limited to certain components of certain industries as of today, the resources available in-house for these processes are also limited. Metal AM has the ability to produce intricate, streamlined components with physical properties that can sometimes exceed those of parts manufactured by traditional means. Consequently, the technology has the potential to completely shift the way that we fabricate critical components. Hence an appropriate action taken by the organization leaders plays a very important role in the implementation and development of this newly found technology. Investment is this technology is the only factor which can smoothen the transition from traditional methods to additive manufacturing.
Whether from a business or a national perspective, the investment into a new technology is a major decision, and in the case of 3D printing, one that requires more facts and major efforts in education to make it more likely to be forthcoming. Additive manufacturing remains a young industry, and it yet has many barriers to overcome before it can begin to approach its potential in the grand scheme of manufacturing