Time for progress

Source: Wikimedia. This image is in the public domain

What’s new?

A recent article in Additive Manufacturing describes how materials and measurement are important factors in the increasing use of additive manufacturing to make medical implants.

What does it mean?

Additive manufacturing is an ever expanding collection of materials and manufacturing methods, all united by the underlying concept of building up an object, usually layer by layer, rather than the traditional manufacturing approach of starting from a large piece of material and removing portions. Additive, not subtractive. The interplay of materials and methods in additive manufacturing is creating a push for new types of products and the urge to use additive manufacturing in different applications is exerting a pull on the research. The result is an explosion of new ideas, including new ideas involving implants in medical applications.

Additive manufacturing is not just resulting in better ways to manufacture medical implants; it is also allowing the redesign of these implants. Objects that are difficult or impossible to manufacture using traditional methods are possible to manufacture additively. But even more, the ongoing development of additive manufacturing materials and methods is moving capabilities further and further.

Most obviously, if you are manufacturing by removing material, it is difficult to get inside an object and remove what is not wanted, but if you are manufacturing by adding material, the outside is created last, leaving the interior exposed and able to be created in ways that were impossible in the past.

For example, this September 2020 article from Additive Manufacturing describes a new process  of powder bed fusion using a titanium-nickel alloy called nitinol to create stents. Because the new additive manufacturing process opened new possibilities, the stents were redesigned to be more effective, and the stents can now be printed for individual use in a specific patient. This interplay of materials, methods, and redesign is happening again and again in additive manufacturing, not just in medical manufacturing, but in many other areas of application. The article in Additive Manufacturing also points out that measurement and the accurate reproduction of those measurements are other key ideas behind the customization enabled by additive manufacturing.

What does it mean for you?

I am very excited to watch the ongoing developments in additive manufacturing. The one concept – create objects by adding rather than subtracting material – is so simple, yet has so many variations, based on different materials and methods.

This process of exploring, inventing, and applying additive technology is being pushed by different materials and methods and pulled by different uses. Depending on your viewpoint, the development is occurring rapidly, with Wikipedia giving 1971 as the date of the first patent related to 3D printing, or it is occurring slowly – that patent is almost 50 years old now. I recall that in the 1980s and early 1990s attention was given to the issue that despite the growth in use of information technology (IT), such use had not led to increases in productivity – some called it the productivity paradox and I even directed a Master’s thesis on the topic. See, for example, this article. That particular productive paradox gets much less attention now, I believe because IT is so ubiquitous that it is difficult to attribute productivity growth or lack of it to IT. We cannot imagine living without IT now.

I believe that additive technology is on its way to becoming similarly ubiquitous and similarly enabling. Additive technology is still the new kid on the block – notice that I have compared it to traditional manufacturing technology – but soon it will be part of the range of manufacturing processes routinely considered by engineers; soon it will be traditional.

The lesson for you is, I think, that a new concept, relentlessly pursued, can have deep and wide effects, but only with hard work and with some time. The development of a new concept is caused by the push of that concept but also by the pull of application. Give it time but also give it attention.

Where can you learn more?

My favorite source for information on developments in additive manufacturing is the online magazine named simply Additive Manufacturing. You can get a print subscription here or the email newsletter here.  Gardner Business Media also publishes Modern Machine Shop Online, another favorite for me. Gardner’s full range of publications is described here.

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