DECEMBER 20238MANUFACTURING TECHNOLOGY INSIGHTSIN MY OPINIONThis summer, President Joe Biden announced the AM Forward initiative to improve domestic manufacturing competitiveness and reduce supply chain disruptions by helping small and medium sized manufacturers adopt additive manufacturing (AM, commonly referred to as 3D printing). Citing 90 percent reductions possible in lead times and material costs, the initiative looks to create a national training program, fast track standard and certification development, and provide financing for equipment purchases. Major aerospace OEMs have signed on to the program, signaling that they will purchase 3D printed components from their domestic suppliers to drive demand. Working for an additive manufacturing original equipment manufacturer (OEM), I applaud and support these efforts. Government focus will improve adoption and competitiveness. Concurrently, I believe that the industry can help push itself forward by focusing on its offerings, ensuring that they are reliable and easy to use. Across brands, machines with these two traits, more than any other factor, will drive adoption of additive manufacturing on factory floors. Additive manufacturing has been on an adoption journey for the past 30 years. In a previous issue, I discussed the four stages of AM. The industry started with rapid prototyping and the universalization of computer aided design (CAD). Then came AM with functional materials and the capability to make end-use parts. Now we have moved into a third phase, AM at scale, and it is not hard to find stories of manufacturers leveraging 3D printing for tens of thousands of parts to overcome supply chain disruptions and keep production lines running. For instance, this summer GM printed 60,000 parts to keep its Tahoe SUV deliveries on time. The final stage is designing for AM, fabricating end-use parts with geometries that cannot be made any other way, using materials designed for the AM process. Moving in this direction, researchers recently reported a new high entropy metal alloy, in the journal Nature, with improved strength and ductility, whose dual-phase nanostructure currently can only be produced with 3D printing. The evolution through the stages is By Joe Roy-Mayhew, VP, R&D and Materials, MarkforgedTHE ROAD TO BRING ADDITIVE MANUFACTURING INTO A MILLION FACTORIESunderway--innovators are adopting 3D printing to overcome design constraints, minimize supply chain disruptions, and decrease time to market. Yet, to further accelerate adoption, and bring AM from ten thousand factories into millions of factories, there needs to be a greater focus in the industry on reliability and ease of use ­ a "just press print" mentality.Reliability is straightforward for leaders to grasp--in production lines, uptime metrics drive performance. A machine going down on a busy line can cost millions of dollars a day in lost productivity. Although Joe Roy-Mayhew
< Page 7 | Page 9 >