When I was in school the teachers took us on a field trip of the local newspaper plant. What I remember is how they assembled the moveable type to print the pages. The typesetter used a mechanical machine to put the individual letters in a frame, so many letters and spaces across, and so many down to match the dimensions of the page. Later these assembled frames would be inked, and the paper pressed to them to be printed. Typesetting machines and typesetters no longer exist. Their industry was disrupted by the computer, and today printing occurs electronically. The history of tech is full of stories of disruptive technologies that changed how we work and live our lives. Additive manufacturing is a disruptive technology.
Traditional Manufacturing
Much of modern manufacturing is subtractive. That means you start with a piece of material and remove portions until you have the right size and shape. Think about woodworking. You begin with a log that is cut into boards at the sawmill. The woodworker then cuts the boards into the right size, and removes material to achieve the right shape. Different pieces might be assembled into a complete object, but each piece was created by subtracting material. Much of the original log winds up as scrap—cut ends too small to be useful
Additive manufacturing is the opposite. You begin with material and form it into the right shape. For example, much of plastics manufacturing involves taking the raw plastic material in a liquid form and putting it into a mold where it is hardened. There can be a lot less waste with additive manufacturing because you aren’t removing waste material to form the shape you need.
What Is a Disruptive Technology?
Disruptive technologies have existed since the beginning of history. These are technologies that change how we do things in significant ways. When the technology becomes established, it replaces how we did something significant in the past. The internal combustion engine, for example, replaced horses as the locomotive force in our vehicles, so today we drive cars instead of riding horses. When this transition happened, the horse and buggy industry all but disappeared, to be replaced by the automotive industry. The petroleum industry grew to support it, but in the future this industry will be disrupted by renewable sources of energy.
Additive Manufacturing Is a Disruptive Technology
Additive manufacturing means using a 3-D printer to make things. In a way a basic 3-D printer is similar to the early dot-matrix computer printers that would print a page by laying down on a page rows of dots that would form characters. The print head would go back and forth across the page, and after each pass, the page would move up slightly to receive the next row of print. These 3-D printers work similarly except they work in three dimensions to form objects out of raw materials. There are several types of 3-D printers, some of which make objects out of plastic and others out of metal.
The 3-D printer technology is in its infancy. Early commercial versions were primarily purchased by hobbyists who used them to make toys and other small objects. There is some manufacturing being done today with this technology, but the printers are expensive and relatively slow, and the materials available are suitable for a narrow range of objects. But as advances in both the materials and printers continue, these limitations will be eventually overcome.
Advantages of Additive Technology
Why will additive manufacturing be a disruptive technology? There are at least four reasons.
- Efficiency: There is little waste with 3-D printing. Where subtractive manufacturing removes waste material that often winds up in landfills, additive technologies have far less waste.
- Easy Modification: Many subtractive manufacturing processes require extensive re-tooling to make even simple modifications. Not so with a 3-D printer where the design of an object is manipulated in software using something akin to a CAD program. A change might be as simple as moving a line on the screen with a mouse, or entering a number to change the size of an object.
- Localized Manufacturing: Much manufacturing will be de-centralized. Rather than having to set up a large and expensive factory to produce items that get shipped to the consumer, 3-D printers can be set up at retail locations so that items can be printed on site as needed. There would be no need to maintain volumes of inventory that might or might not sell. There would be no need to move inventory from location to location.
- Do-It-Yourself Manufacturing: Gene Rodenberry, the creator of Star Trek, anticipated this technology in the original series in the 1960s. One of the technologies featured in the show was the replicator that would produce any object on command. One of the crew would give a verbal command, and a few moments later the object would appear in the device. Today we have computers that understand verbal commands, and many people own their own 3-D printers. As those printers gain capability, many people will use them to make objects that in the past they would purchase from a store.
Additive manufacturing is a disruptive technology because it will revolutionize many industries, and change the way we manufacture, market, and distribute products. It is hard to know how many of the things we manufacture can eventually be produced on a future advanced form of 3-D printer, but much of what we produce today with a subtractive process with be done in this new way.
Photo by Wendelin Jacober from Pexels
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