Stratasys [NASDAQ: SSYS]

Neil Hopkinson

Like many new technologies, 3D Printing / Additive Manufacturing (AM) has been subject to a fair amount of hype and conjecture since its inception in the late 1980s.  The notion of having a printer in every home to print spare forks and the like has thankfully been debunked and more pragmatic, economically sound, but still profoundly advantageous use cases are emerging. These cases include high-volume manufacturing applications. 

So, how is AM being used to help high-volume manufacturing enterprises? 

The first and most established place is for the creation of physical prototypes that allow product development teams to accelerate time to market for new products but also to experiment with more exciting and groundbreaking designs to deliver improved products to the market sooner. However, this use of AM is hardly new – the use of 3D Printing for Rapid Prototyping has been embedded in many progressive manufacturing enterprises for 30+ years.

This leads to the next and most significant opportunity for manufacturing enterprises to benefit from the disruptive family of technologies known as AM. Manufacturing of final parts.  One of the pioneers of this use of AM recently spoke to Manufacturing Technology Insights to provide a unique perspective on how manufacturing enterprises are using AM.  Prof Neil Hopkinson, VP of Additive Manufacturing at global 3D Printing leader Stratasys, explains “at the turn of the millennium we were beginning to see a future where AM technologies (which were then referred to as Rapid Prototyping) could replace injection molding for production of parts in the low thousands”. Indeed, in the last 20 years, we have seen multiple cases in sectors such as high-end automotive, aerospace, and medical, where final parts that would previously have been molded are now printed. In these cases, AM eliminates tooling, enabling value-add through geometry freedom and cost reduction – but only for low to medium volumes in series production – typically no higher than 10,000 units.

 “For high-volume production, what we are seeing more and more is optimized business and product lifecycle approaches conducted through a hybrid co-existence of the new and the traditional approaches using AM at the start of production, molding for the main production, and then AM again for supply of spare parts.”

So, does AM play a role in the mainstream of high-volume manufacturing?   The answer appears to be “yes” according to Hopkinson, who continues “Our initial ideas about replacing injection molding do not look like the most pragmatic answer, at least for high volumes. Instead, for high-volume production, what we are seeing more and more is optimized business and product lifecycle approaches conducted through a hybrid co-existence of the new and the traditional approaches using AM at the start of production, molding for the main production, and then AM again for supply of spare parts.”  Essentially, this can be seen as employing AM as an on-ramp for early production when tooling is not yet ready, or the market for the product is not yet established, injection molding for the main production at the lowest cost per part, and AM as an off-ramp for the simplified supply of spare parts once main production has eased off.

Hopkinson adds, “At Stratasys, we are seeing customers employ AM in the “Bridge” period prior to commitment to mold tooling to manufacture parts in quantities of 10’s of thousands – this is now a matter of routine and early adopters of this approach are seeing immeasurable benefits in accelerated time to market”.  Interestingly, this approach sees injection molding being used to replace Additive Manufacturing – spinning the original thinking on its head. What this approach is also doing is giving manufacturers confidence that AM parts can do the job just as well as, or often better than, their molded counterparts, which could lead to the use of AM exclusively in place of injection molding for medium-volume production of parts in volumes over 100,000.