Posted on Thursday 9 August 2007
Via a post on the Mass Custom website comes word of a pretty good article over on Design News, “Rapid Manufacturing’s Role in the Factory of the Future” (Link). Clips from the article:
With six machines, Morris has the world’s highest concentration of DMLS capacity. And he has been using those machines not just to make prototypes but also to turn out production parts.
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Morris believes additive fabrication systems will soon occupy an increasingly prominent space on our shop floors. “We’re on the verge of a revolution in how things are made,” he says.
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Boeing, for example, has made extensive use of rapid prototyping machines to produce parts, tooling and manufacturing aids for the F18 and other military aircraft. “We’ve just touched the tip of the digital manufacturing iceberg,” says Jeff DeGrange, an engineering manager with Boeing’s Phantom Works.
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“Rapid manufacturing is a hot topic right now,” [Terry Wohlers] says.
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“I think you’ll start to see hybrid factories that combine layered manufacturing with conventional manufacturing methods like injection molding,” says Hollis.
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How long will it take for engineers to recognize the design benefits associated with additive processes? Todd Grimm, a consultant to the rapid prototyping industry, thinks it could take 10 or even 20 more years given the current lack of familiarity with additive machines and the technical barriers associated with the machines themselves. “It’s going to take a long time for direct digital manufacturing to be considered commonplace. We really are talking about the factory of the future here,” he says.
This is a nicely-balanced article, fully laying out the problems but also explaining the advantages… especially in creating composite tooling and manufacturing aids.
If there’s one area it doesn’t fully explore, however, it’s the one on which I’ve focused (for the very reasons covered by this article): low-volume, niche products. Of course I wouldn’t expect them to cover it; there isn’t nearly as much money in it as there is in turbine engine components. That convergence is still a while off.
Hey ya
Low volume, niche products = long tail, yes?
Long tail = 60% (+) of commerce, yes?
This is interesting to us – and our customers ;)
[...] In a nutshell, “rapid manufacturing” is poised for an unprecedented explosion of growth in the next 3 to 5 years. To see why this potential exists, it’s necessary to examine a broad set of shaping factors. If only a single segment is explored, significant growth looks to be much further out but when one takes into account the converging sources of influences and innovation at work, a different perspective emerges. in this regard it is helpful to examine some other patterns of technology evolution. Initially PC’s were no match for mainframes when it came to raw processing power, but their accessibility(price and learning curve) enabled people to do things they simply couldn’t do before. In the process, people pushed the limits of PC’s and accelerated the demand for reducing their limits. They also at the same transformed the design and operation of mainframes – Linux and Java are significant contributors to renewed interest in mainframes. During the early days of PC’s many people didn’t see the potential for rapid growth because PC database programs could only manage a fraction of the data that mainframes did. These skeptics didn’t realize that departments and groups within departments did not need the capacity of a mainframe for many important tasks. They didn’t recognize how big an impact spreadsheets would have or what it would mean to empower thousands of developers previously unable to create solutions because they couldn’t afford the necessary equipment. A similar pattern unfolded for the web, although desktop publishing is probably more relevant to the subject of desktop manufacturing. I found via reBang to an excellent, but narrowly focused review of a Design News feature on Rapid Manufacturing’s Role in the Factory of the Future. The discussion is valuable but assumes that traditional high production volume factories will continue to dominate the manufacturing landscape forever and ignores overlapping influences. Like mainframes and printing presses, high production volume factories will be with us for a long time, their fall from dominance will happen faster then most people think and they will be significantly transformed by the emerging paradigm. How will this happen? Services such as Xardas and Ponoko are starting to give people the very powerful experience of “holding ideas in their hands” and providing engineers with insights into new forms of fabrication. With 3D printer prices dropping into the consumer electronics range, the number of people and organizations able to fabricate goods from their computers will grow rapidly. Architects, landscapers and engineering entrepreneurs will find immediate uses for these but many folks especially those lacking professional design and manufacturing experience will be frustrated. Parts will break or won’t come out right, but through Supplier Source and other online sources connections to professionals will be found. It’s not hard to envision Google figuring out a fabrication tie-in to it’s 3D Warehouse. All of this activity will expand the base of experiences and provide valuable feedback for engineers and designers. It will also drive demand for higher end 3D fabrication machines, as well as CNC machines. At some point I expect that Fed-Ex/Kinkos will probably throw their hat in the ring and some distributed manufacturing network startup with have a huge IPO. Perhaps more significantly, a new type of product or service that hasn’t been thought of yet will emerge(think Lotus 1-2-3 or Amazon). One source in the Design News article put the widespread use of direct digital manufacturing 20 years out but by then nanotechnology will have already started having a significant impact. Desktop manufacturing is being driven by exponentially growing factors it’s just always hard to see it in the early stages. I think Ray Kurzweil has it exactly right Although technology grows in the exponential domain, we humans live in a linear world. So technological trends are not noticed as small levels of technological power are doubled. Then seemingly out of nowhere, a technology explodes into view. For example, when the Internet went from 20,000 to 80,000 nodes over a two year period during the 1980s, this progress remained hidden from the general public. A decade later, when it went from 20 million to 80 million nodes in the same amount of time, the impact was rather conspicuous. [...]