Технические науки/8. Обработка
материалов в машиностроении.
Kamsky
G.V. *, Kolomiets A.A.**
*Ural Polytechnic College, Russia
**Technion – Israel Institute of Technology,
Israel
Our future in
Additive Manufacturing
New forms,
new applications, searching of new materials, all of this are the
characteristics of new modern innovative technology – Additive Manufacturing
(AM), or 3D-printing.
Like email, 3D printing is now common. It’s been embraced by all
industries as a means of product development, data visualization, rapid
prototyping, manufacturing, including distributed manufacturing and
print-on-demand services. Celebrity comedian Jay Leno uses this technology to
print obsolete parts to maintain his extensive automobile collection. Amazon
sells 3D printers and supplies through its online store to be sold to the
average consumer for realizing their own parts.
PROTOTYPING
Additive manufacturing
as scientific and industrial direction started in 1970s-1980s from morphology. It was called
prototyping.
Rapid
prototyping helps companies turn great ideas into successful products faster
than ever before. 3D printing your prototypes directly from CAD data enables
fast, frequent revisions based on real-world testing and feedback.
Nowadays
users are even could use AM without knowing CAD technologies or other special
drawing packages, using just 3D-scaners that create model for you.
ENTERTAINMENT
INDUSTRY
This
application is the most close to prototyping but also shows how AM technologies
permeated to different spheres of our life. We are waiting for a holiday,
children are waiting for a present, and a bride is waiting for a ring that no
one has.
This
technology allows to create exclusive presents, jewelry and business souvenirs.
All depends just on your design. Moreover, you can decide how many specimens
you want to print.
AM FOR
MEDICINE
Thousands of people do not realize that they have
already become a part of 3D printing revolution in medicine. According to the
report on 3D printing industry, there are more than 10,000,000 3D printed
hearing aids circulating worldwide. 3D printing technology has absolutely
improved their manufacturing process.
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3D Printed Hearing
Aids: A Revolution you may have not heard about |
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In early spring of this year, an American patient
got a radical surgery performed and 75% of his skull was replaced with a 3D
printed implant. This material was not only biocompatible but also a bone-like.
Scott DeFelice, President and CEO of Oxford Performance Materials, announced that
his company has serious plans that between 300 to 500 patients in the U.S.
alone could have skull replacement surgeries each month.
Eric Moger was the first person
to start a life once again with 3D printed
face.
The highest goal of the technology is to
save lives. From 3D printed food and plastic wrenches, technology moves
straight to artificial blood cell printing and represents the important step in
the development of artificial organ transplants since the current generation of
artificial organs lack the vascular network needed to function properly.
Scientists from Germans' Fraunhofer Institute use the particular technique that
involves artificial biological molecules printed out with a 3D inkjet printer,
then they form the shape of blood vessels.
This technology is still quite imprecise
for the fine structures of capillary vessels, so the scientists use the laser
to zap the molecules and to form the material. Real blood vessels have two
layers as well as the artificial ones, so they can form complex branching
structures.
Skin graft transplantation is nothing new in the
medicine. It has become casual but extremely painful procedure, while a part of
healthy skin is removed to cover the damaged place of a body. As 3D printing
technology has enabled scientists to play even with the most futuristic ideas,
they come up with one: to produce the artificial skin. Researchers at the
University of Toronto have developed a method of loading skin cells and various
polymers into 3D printer to artificially create thick layers of skin.
AM FOR AUTOMOBILES AND AEROSPACE
Companies which fabricate automobiles are some of the
most intense users of 3D printing in the industry. They use 3D printing for a
lot of applications and they have been doing so for years. Because there is so
much engineering and design involved in the industry and due to the sheer
number of parts required in a modern automobile, 3D printing is the ideal
technology to prototype these parts.
Concept Cars
Since quite a while, concept cars have been 3D printed.
The main application is to use the technique of 3D printing for the interior of
the car. In this way a lot of time and money can be saved.
Prototyping
car parts
Tier 1 automotive suppliers and car manufacturers use
3D printing to print the initial prototypes of parts of the car, like door
handles for example. In the beginning, this was only done for visual
prototypes, however now there are more applications being found. Prototyping
car parts helps speed up the time to market, because engineers can remove any
obstacles early in the product development cycle.
Production of
parts in small series
Examples of series production parts are quite rare. Although
there are some cars which are partially made by hand. As each car is made by
hand, minute differences mean mass production would not work here. So some
parts are uniquely 3D printed for each car.
Fit and form
testing
More and more items, like door handles, are tested by
engineering teams and also by customers. It is very useful, as this gives
people a chance to give feedback on a new part. It allows people to test the
functionality of the part, but also how it works in more complex assemblies.
Unique cards
3D printing to customize a car is also not unheard of.
Sometimes it concerns just individualized components, monograms and the inside
of the car, like the lining. But designing a car from scratch is also possible,
with a design firm. They can help create a design and hand it over to an
automotive manufacturer.
But what use is this technology for
Aerospace. Consider the wing of a conventional aircraft. The curved shape of
the wing, coupled with a source of propulsion, is what makes flight
possible. The wing, covered with an aluminum skin, is made of metal spars
and ribs that give the wing strength to ensure it does not fail in
flight. Manufacturing of these components with conventional CNC machines
always leads to a predominance of wasted material. Certainly the waste is
harvested to be recast into raw material ready to be milled once again.
Recycling material certainly saves money but it’s still expensive to return the
waste material to a site where it is to be melted and recast or rolled into
sheets and blocks of material, transportation to another site for milling parts
and then transportation of those components to another site for assembly onto
the aircraft. Every additional site adds more risk that the part will be
produced out of tolerance, possibly with catastrophic consequences. With 3D
printing, the part could be created from raw materials directly at the site
where it will be used, thereby reducing the risk of possible defects occurring
from improperly shipped components, milling by out-of-tolerance equipment, etc.
However lucrative 3D printing may seem,
safety critical +aircraft parts require certification by aviation authorities
before they can be installed on commercial aircraft. In fact, despite all
the obvious successes with 3D printing, the FAA has only just certified the
first 3D-printed part for use on a commercial jet engine*. The part is a
T25 housing for a compressor inlet temperature sensor fabricated by GE Aviation
and it will be retrofitted to over 400 GE90-94B jet engines on the Boeing 777. 3D
printing allows the part to be lighter, more complex, and made of a singular
piece instead of several fitted together. GE says that making a prototype
of the T25 would have taken a year longer using conventional manufacturing
methods.
GE is using
laser-powered 3D printers, 3D "inking" and "painting"
machines, and other advanced manufacturing tools to make parts and products
that were thought impossible to produce and which sometimes verge on art. We
see advanced manufacturing as the next chapter in the industrial revolution.
Airbus has recently announced that its new
A350 XWB includes over 1000 components manufactured by 3D printing. These are
plastic parts produced by Stratasys. The Airbus video below includes some
insight into the 3D printing facilities used to produce parts for their
aircraft.
In November 2014 NASA reported that the International
Space Station’s 3D printer had made the first 3D-printed object in space. This
is yet another in a complex list of steps needed to achieve sustainable
long-term space expeditions. To print a 3D part, not only do you need the
printer but also the raw materials. If these raw materials were available
extraterrestrially, it may be possible to achieve meaningful colonization on
Mars or other planets. What was once considered science fiction may now
be science possible.
3D- PRINTING
OF HOUSES
Scientists in California say new technology will soon allow
massive 3D printers to build entire multi-level houses in under a day.
The
process begins with leveling the area where a 3D-printed house will soon be
built, and then trenches are dug around the perimeter and filled with concrete.
A system of rails is then erected on the sides of the foundation, and the
printing contraption itself is then lowered down using a crane and fed the
building materials.
Like
traditional 3D printers, the system carefully spills out those materials layer
by layer as the machine expands to a height of roughly two stories,
consistently building upward as more concrete is unloaded. Instead of being
left with a plastic toy or, as some have made possible recently, a gun, this
process would ideally soon enough end with an entire structure created from
close to nothing.
“Using
this process, a single house or a colony of houses, each with possibly a
different design, may be automatically constructed in a single run,” the
Contour Crafting website reads. The designs take into account additions that
would need to be added after the fact, like plumbing, electrical lining and
windows, which can then be easily outfitted once the rest of the structure is
solid and standing.
CONCLUSION
Many
believe that 3D printing will revolutionize manufacturing and its industries.
With NASA printing engine parts to rockets and Boing planning to print fully
functional airplane wings it´s hard to argue. It is also easy to get carried
away, imagining a futuristic sci-fi world where everything needed around us
will be printed without taking the earlier addressed limitations into the
equation. The futures of additive manufacturing will likely involve significant
sharing of production facilities (Eitel 2013). As files are transferred
digitally, production can happen locally as close to the end user as possible.
This eliminates global shipping and the damage it brings upon the environment.
Aerospace is the industry other industries look to for a glimpse of what the
future might bring. They were the earliest adopter of carbon fiber and the
first to integrate CAD/CAM into the design process. Both of these
implementations are now commonplace throughout industries and doesn´t require
financial justification (Hiemenz 2013). There are many other examples that show
that trends in aerospace predict the future, which is reassuring for the
additive manufacturing industry. I am confident when saying that AM will
dictate manufacturing in industry in the future.
As
of today AM is widely used for product development in RD departments across the
mentioned industries, throughout all functions and processes. The most common
uses include concept models, functional prototypes, tooling and production
components. It is rapidly growing into a large-scale industry. Additive
manufacturing gives the flexibility to iterate while facilitating for faster
turnaround resulting in products arriving the market sooner, while keeping
costs down and thus increasing profit. The role of 3D printing in manufacturing
is an important ecological factor. Due to less material prepared and wasted in
the process of manufacture, AM is beneficial to the environment when compared
to traditional processes. As of today, the process of printing itself is to
energy consuming and has to be developed further. The manufacturing
technology´s success and widespread use throughout the transport industry is
inevitable. Aerospace and motor sports are leading the way, using AM for small
production parts. The technology is producing components with good material
properties at lighter weights resulting in better performance. The evolution of
3D printing won´t happen overnight, as there are problems yet to figure out.
Today, AM within production is used mainly for non-critical parts. For the
technology to facilitate the production of load bearing components there has to
be developed validation standards for material and process quality. The
sensitivity of current machines is an issue and has to be dealt with. When
printing a component several times the mechanical properties have to be stable
from one print to the next. Additive manufacturing might very well become the
de facto method of industrial manufacture in the future. While its historical
underpinnings date several decades back it´s only in recent years the
technology has been widely implemented in product development, completely
altering how and what can be made. The direct connection between designer and
manufacturing is re-established. It is believed that we will see remarkable
shift from use limited to prototyping over to production.
Literature:
1. Erik Saitre.
Development of Additive Manufacturing Technology. Implications on the design
process and the transportation industry, moving from prototyping to production.
Department of Product Design Norwegian University of Science and Technology
3. First 3D
printer reaches high street http://www.theguardian.com/
4. 3D Printing
in Medicine: How Technology Will Save Your Life https://www.cgtrader.com/blog/3d-printing-in-medicine-how-technology-will-save-yourlife
6. C. Y. Yap, C. K. Chua, Z. L. Dong, Z. H. Liu, D. Q. Zhang, L. E. Loh, and S. L. Sing Review of selective laser melting: Materials and applications. Applied Physics Reviews 2, 041101 (2015); doi: 10.1063/1.4935926