The 3-D Printing RevolutionSteve Ellis

Additive manufacturing, or 3-D printing as it is known to the rest of us, is setting the stage to make a big breakout into mainstream sales, manufacturing and product design process

3-D printed products are proving themselves to being safe and durable, and associated costs have been decreasing as more players enter the 3-D printing arena

This is a method that, unlike traditional manufacturing methods, offers producers a lot more flexibility when it comes to changing their designs

Numerous companies are already ramping up their production with additive manufacturing, including: GE, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Google and Invisalign, to name a few

These are some very large and important companies, who make anything from your household appliances to the planes you fly on

GE Aviation, proving that GE makes more than just refrigerators, has taken to printing fuel nozzles for certain jet engines

While traditional manufacturing may seem more suitable to hitting GE’s output goals of 45,000 units of the same fuel nozzle design in a year, it would require GE to cast several different parts from which to then put together the final product (fuel nozzle)

Thanks to 3-D printing, GE can achieve similar output but by printing each fuel nozzle as one whole piece - something that can’t easily be achieved through traditional methods

To add to that, GE Aviation estimates that production costs will be as low as 75% thanks to 3-D printing

That’s impressive for a method that still has a lot of advancing to do

A c c o r d i n g t o a s u r v e y b y PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), out of 100 manufacturing companies surveyed, 11% ( including the companies named above) had already switched to producing large volumes of printed parts or whole products

An analyst from Gartner, the largest IT search and analysis firm in the world, believes that by the time that adoption reaches 20%, 3-D printing will officially be “mainstream”

The 3-D printing revolution is happening and it is not just because companies are realizing that they can use 3-D printing in innovative ways to improve their products, it is also that the regular consumer’s interest in 3-D printing and 3-D printed products is increasing

The Harvard Business Review reports that sales of 3-D printers accounted for one-third of the volume of industrial automation and robotic sales

By 2020, it is projected that it will rise up to 40%

-Steve Ellis

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