Why is 3D Printing important

As I explained in another video, 3D printing is essentially a way of constructing a 3-dimensional object by putting down thin layers of material. The 3D printer deposits the layers by using information from a computer file that describes the object’s 3-dimensional shape. So, in essence, you can create any object once you have a 3D printer, the material for the object, and the computer file that describes the object’s shape. This can really shake things up when it comes to manufacturing products, which is why 3D printing is so important and is getting so much attention.

For starters, you can now buy a desktop 3D printer and build complex (but small) products at home. This is like the early days of personal computing -- only, this time, it’s “personal manufacturing.” We’ll have to wait and see what the hobbyists achieve with 3D printing, but it’s exciting because “personal manufacturing” could shake things up just as personal computers did.

On the commercial side, engineers are now able to “3D print” fully functional metal parts using titanium and steel. If commercial manufacturing moves to 3D printing, you won’t need factories with assembly lines to make products, instead they can be built in one or more 3D printers. And a single 3D printing facility could print many different types of products. You would be able to “print” products on demand and at many different locations -- all you have to do is send over the data file for the product. It’d make sense to print products at locations near customers.

On the other hand, you need far fewer people to operate 3D printers than assembly lines. That could mean less jobs, but that could also be helpful for an aging society. If 3D printing is the way products are manufactured, then there won’t be any need to set up factories in countries with cheap labor. That’s something to think about.

Finally, 3D printing is not limited to just the types of products we currently know -- researchers are working on printing many different types of objects, including, for example, tissues and human organs. Who knows, someday in the future, there’d be 3D-printed artificial organs for people who need transplants!

What is 3D Printing

3D printing is a lot in technology news nowadays. It’s essentially a way of constructing a 3-dimensional object by putting down thin layers of material. You can understand it best by looking at an example (see my video for the details).

Suppose you needed an object of a certain shape for a project. In the past, you'd have started with a block of material and removed the parts you don't need to arrive at the desired shape. That's "subtractive manufacturing" where you create a shape by removing material. If you think about it, you could also create that object by putting down the material a layer at a time, each layer with the needed shape. That, in essence, is 3D printing -- the method of creating a 3D object by laying down material a layer at a time. It's also called "additive manufacturing" because you add material rather than remove material. As you can see, this approach is less wasteful because you end up using exactly the amount of material you need.

3D printers are already available for people to buy and use. Here is an example -- the Makerbot Replicator -- that costs around two to three thousand dollars. The situation with 3D Printers is similar to when the PCs first became widely available in early to mid 1980s. If you are into it, you can now buy a 3D Printer and experiment with it, as many are already doing.

These printers use plastic filaments that are melted and laid down layer by layer to create a 3D object from a computer file that describes the object. The printer takes the 3D description and keeps putting down material layer by layer until the whole shape is created. You can create objects of any complexity with this approach. For example, using the old "subtractive" approach, it's quite difficult to create an object with some complex cavity inside of it, but something like that is simple to do with 3D printers.

Although most consumer 3D printers use plastic as the material, there are industrial 3D printers that can "print" objects using metals and other materials. General Electric, for example, is printing jet engine parts using 3D printers and whole cars have been printed using industrial 3D printers.

The example I used in the video showed an object created from paper and guess what, The Economist magazine had an article in its Aug 10th-016th, 2013 issue that talks about a 3D printer that creates 3D objects using paper!

That's 3D Printing in simple terms. Later I'll discuss why it's such a big deal.