"Planes, Trains and Automobiles": What next for 3D printing?

In 2008 I remember standing in front of a 3D printer at the Renault Formula 1 team factory in the heart of ‘Motorsports Valley’ in Enstone, Oxfordshire, in the UK. I had never seen a 3D printer before and I marvelled as layer upon layer was added to what was a precision part for the high performance engine of a formula one racing car. I watched mesmerized as the piece slowly rose and took shape, as if from some primordial soup. 3D printing has been around for a couple of decades now, with some suggesting that its impact and potential has been over-hyped. Nevertheless, there have been a number of high profile breakthroughs in this sector, from Makerbot to the more controversial 3D printed handgun, and last week saw the arrival of the first 3D printed car, the Strati, but where is all this going and what next for 3D printing?

Prosumer or mass market?

Debate still rages as to whether 3D printing will remain the preserve of the power user, or prosumer, or make the leap to the mass market, with 3D printers someday becoming as ubiquitous as your average desktop Epson or HP printer. Gartner, the technology research organization, in a recent report has suggested that mainstream 3D printing is about 5 to 10 years away.

Use of the term ‘3D printing’, however, really seems to have fired people’s imaginations and helped to transform a little-understood industrial process into the perception that this is becoming a more mainstream technology that is now on everybody’s lips and with the power to disrupt. In the past few years that evolutionary process has been helped, amongst other things, by the rise of a number of startups intent on challenging the big boys by attempting to bring 3D printing to the desktop, such as Makerbot and Formlabs. Such was their promise that they soon came into the crosshairs of the industry big beasts, with Stratasys snapping up Makerbot in 2013. Whilst the jury is still out on whether this will be good for the industry in the long term, the drama from startup to corporate prey is well chronicled in the Netflix documentary, “Print the Legend”.

“You can have every color you like, including black!”

There is no doubt that 3D printing has the potential to be a disruptive technology that may forge a new industrial revolution and overturn the logic of outsourcing manufacturing to the developing world and upend the requirement for economies of scale in making manufactured goods. Instead of long production runs and expensive tooling, I can make one item almost as economically as one million and I can customize it so that it’s exactly the way you want it, from colour and styling to functionality and form. As Henry Ford might have said, if he was talking about 3D printing, “you can have every color you like, including black!”

7 Sectors: Disruptive Technology & New Industrial Revolution

Here are seven sectors where I think that 3D printing will bring about a revolution in the way in which we manufacture and distribute 3-dimensional physical objects:

1. Pharmaceuticals – The potential here is vast and it has the long term potential to disrupt the multi-billion Dollar pharmaceuticals industry by allowing customers to print their drugs and medicine at the point of need. Not only would it make simple over-the-counter medicines, like Ibuprofen, cheaper to produce, but also drugs where there is low demand could be printed cost-effectively for the patient, because economies of scale would not make producing small batches prohibitive.
2. Automobiles – If the arrival of the Strati is anything to go by, there could come a day when you just walk into the car dealer’s showroom and have the make and model that you want printed there and then for you. At least that is the vision of Jay Rogers the CEO of Local Motors the company that designed and built the Strati. With just 49 parts, including the 3D printed body shell, that represents a considerable saving on the circa 5,000 parts needed to build the average family car.
3. Aerospace – Disruption is already being felt within the aerospace industry, with GE’s new LEAP and GE9x engines using 3D printed fuel nozzles and turbines that add to the durability of the part, but also reduce fuel consumption. The potential is for airlines to print the part they need, wherever in the world the aircraft happens to be, whether that is at some remote airport, or even for an airforce jet onboard an aircraft carrier.
4. Construction – In China the construction company Winsun recently produced 10 3D printed houses in a single day and for a cost of $5,000 per unit and atUSC California a team is working on a large 3D printer that will fabricate a house in one go: walls, electrics and plumbing. These changes may bring cheaper and more affordable houses for the masses and the potential for disruption is huge.
5. Healthcare and Prosthetics – In this sector strides are already being made in terms of prosthetics and diagnosis is being assisted by physicians able to see a 3D printed model of a heart from a scan, to enable them to examine its structure and propose an appropriate treatment. There is even progress being made in the field of bioprinters that could make everything from ears to vital organs.
6. Manufacturing – It is conceivable that when you place an order via the Amazon website that the item is then produced at the large sheds that were once their vast distribution centers and now become their distribution and manufacturing centers and delivered by drone, of course. The ability to produce anywhere and in any volume may well disrupt the comparative economic advantage that low-cost manufacturing nations, such as China, have enjoyed over the developed world. This is somewhat different from onshoring, because you will not see the same numbers of people employed in vast factories being repatriated, instead there may be scope for small specialist printers for items that cannot be fabricated instore or in the home.
7. Food – Who needs Raymond Blanc when your 3D printer can rustle up a gourmet meal without the need to travel to the nearest fine dining restaurant? All I do is download the file and the printer does the rest and with no messy pots and pans to wash up after the meal! There are a number of 3D food printers already on the market, such as Foodini, Candy and Chefjets and they are working with confectionary, pasta and chocolate. NASA has even funded research to produce 3D printed food for deep space missions.

These are just a few areas where the initial ripples of disruption are starting to be felt, but this revolution is not going to be overnight, and my list is by no means meant to be exhaustive, I could quite easily have mentioned the advances being made in other applications, such as entertainment, art, fashion, and jewellery, etc. And if you think the price of replacing your laser print cartridges is exorbitant, just you wait until you are paying for the 3D replacements for your desktop 3D printer!

What do you think? Is 3D printing just over-hyped or are we on the verge of a new industrial revolution?

Written by Will Trevor - Founder and Training Consultant at Windsor Training: will.trevor@windsortraining.net

Picture credit: By S zillayali (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons