Due to the development of additive manufacturing (AM) technology over the last decade, today's professional 3D printers are used for much more than creative hobbies and rapid prototyping.

Did you know that a 3D printer no bigger than a desktop home aquarium can print plastic parts strong enough to be used as functional components on race cars? Today, professional 3D printers are trusted to build parts for many high-risk, safety-critical applications: such as flying aboard aircraft and carrying loads in factories up to 960 kg (2116.44 lb).

New part strength and other technological improvements in the 3D printing space have opened up many amazing new applications for today's professional 3D printers. So what are today's 3D printers capable of – and what technology enables these new capabilities?

What can you do with a professional 3D printer?

The ability to print robust parts at the point of need – and with the right material properties – opens up many possibilities for how manufacturers can use 3D printing:

High-end audio equipment manufacturer Wilson Benesch uses 3D printed composites as manufacturing parts, such as with this turntable system.

In the factory. A professional 3D printer can be used to quickly and cheaply build tools, build components for industrial machines, or quickly produce spare parts where needed.

Parts built with today's professional 3D printers have been used to repeatedly lift and move loads.

Aircraft parts. Strong, lightweight, flame-resistant AM materials are available, designed specifically for demanding aerospace applications. The traceability of these AM materials means that aerospace manufacturers can simply press “print” to create flight-ready end-use parts.

The autonomous robots, built by engineers from institutions including NASA JPL, MIT and Caltech, have approximately 15 3D-printed parts.

robotics. AM is ideal for manufacturing and maintaining robotic systems. A team of 60 engineers from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and other organizations used their professional 3D printer in a robotics competition. 3D printing allowed them to build an impact-resistant, lightweight body for their robotic vehicle and perform quick on-site maintenance for broken parts.

Automotive. Race car teams use additive manufacturing to quickly build final car parts that are strong, lightweight and heat-resistant to maximize performance.

Production parts: Manufacturers can also use 3D printers to produce parts with complex geometries, individual end-use parts, or for more cost-effective low-volume production runs. Today's professional 3D printers can reliably produce high-quality surface finishes, making them suitable for building end-use parts on consumer goods, such as Wilson Benesch rotary machine systems.

Supply chain control. Access to in-house AM allows manufacturers to reimagine their supply chains with less risk. Delivery times can be drastically reduced, dependencies on external suppliers can be eliminated and potential logistics delays can be circumvented. Engineers will not have to wait weeks to months for the parts they ordered to arrive. Through the cloud, parts stored as digital inventory can be sent to any printer on the network—and rapidly built at the specific point of need in just hours to days.

Tiny Pilot uses a professional 3D printer as an affordable means to mass-produce durable, professional-looking boxes in which to house kernel-based virtual machine (KVM) parts over IP devices.

What Powers Today's Professional 3D Printers?

Until the last five years or so, even the best professional 3D printers were relegated to rapid prototyping and little else. These six key advances in AM technology have made 3D printing a suitable means of producing robust end-use parts at the right time and point of need:

Power, speed, size, reliability. To meet manufacturers' needs for mass production, professional 3D printers have evolved with greatly improved print speeds, reliability, maximum part sizes, and part quality. Even desktop-sized 3D printers can now be relied upon to produce consistent, high-quality results in key manufacturing roles.

Convenience for the user. The development of user-friendly 3D printing software streamlines and automates many previous points of complication in older AM workflows into a much simpler process. Now, the effective use of professional 3D printers does not require specialized manpower or AM expertise.

Innovative materials. Today's 3D printing materials have gone beyond prototyping materials. Suppliers have created specialized high-performance 3D printing materials for demanding applications, such as aerospace-grade composites, that are stronger than machined aluminum but at a fraction of the weight. Parts can be printed with high heat resistance, chemical resistance and reinforced with continuous carbon fiber to add extra strength throughout the part.

Metal FFF. Metal filament fabrication (MFFF) technology means that 3D printing metal parts is now faster, safer and more cost-effective than ever before. Metal FFF printers offer a wide range of material availability – such as stainless steel, tool steels, Inconel and copper – and can be used with minimal PPE and precautions.

Industry 4.0 connectivity. Cloud-based connectivity between each user and a set of printers also enables distributed production operations. Users can initiate 3D printer prints in different geographic locations. The ability to ensure that the right part is available both where and when it is needed can solve many critical supply chain inefficiencies and challenges.

3D printing software integrations allow users to initiate part production through requests in core factory systems – such as a manufacturing execution system (MES), Enterprise resource planning (ERP) or enterprise asset management (EAM) – or by scanning physical part barcode to be duplicated.

What makes today's 3D printed plastic so strong and flexible?

Today's professional 3D printers produce high-performance plastic parts by building strong composite materials , which include continuous fibers for strength, durability and material property advantages.

What is a composite material? A composite material results when two or more materials—each with different properties—combine without mixing or dissolving together. Typically, materials are selected for complementary properties and result in a material optimized for specific conditions.

Composites consist of a weaker bonding material that is reinforced with a reinforcing material. The "fibers" of a stronger material are surrounded by a less strong material, which is called the "matrix". Most production composites include a plastic matrix such as polyamide, while the reinforcing fibers can be fiberglass or carbon fiber.

Composite materials are widely used because of their high strength and stiffness, low weight and allow freedom of design. A composite material can be hundreds of times stronger than each of its constituents.

While composite materials can be made without professional 3D printers, traditional ways of producing composites can be labor-intensive, require significant training and specialized knowledge, and require very expensive equipment and machinery.

Scott Leoncini, director of education at Titans of CNC, demonstrates the strength and stiffness of a continuous fiber reinforced 3D printed part.

The role of continuous fibers. In the strongest composites from professional 3D printers, continuous fibers act as a reinforcing fibrous component that combines with a plastic matrix.

Continuous fibers are bundles of long fibers that are covered with a thermoplastic coating. They give the composite part the strength to guide the metal. They have elastic moduli between 16 times and 46 times greater than those of plastics. Unlike chopped fibers, which are dispersed throughout the plastic, continuous fibers run continuously through the part, thereby distributing the load throughout the three-dimensional geometry of the part. They perform best in tension, so it is extremely important to print them with the loading conditions in mind.

Continuous fibers are often made of carbon fiber, but can also be continuous fiberglass, Kevlar®, and HSHT (high strength, high temperature) fiberglass.

Unlike parts reinforced with longer continuous fibers, parts printed with chopped fibers are not technically composites because the fibers are mixed inside the plastic instead of remaining distinct. Although chopped fibers are associated with modest increases in strength and stiffness, they do not provide the significant boost provided by continuous fiber reinforcement. Chopped fibers provide gradual improvement in part properties, while continuous fibers allow step change improvement.

Custom drive dog printed by Titans of CNC, designed for grinding. Each blue line represents a layer of continuous fibers.

3D printing of continuous fiber composites. Continuous Fiber Reinforcement (CFR) 3D printed parts work by combining continuous fibers with a plastic matrix.

When printing a part with continuous fiber reinforcement, the professional 3D printer uses two nozzles and extrusion systems. The plastic material is extruded through a heated nozzle while a second nozzle releases continuous fibers into the material. The release of the plastic material through the heated nozzle thermally melts the thermoplastic coating that surrounds each strand of continuous fibers, melting it so that it adheres to the plastic matrix.

Parts can be reinforced in many different ways to optimize for different loading conditions. The fibers can be laid in a wide variety of 2D orientations in each layer of the 3D printed part.

The user can also dynamically control the amount of fiber in the part by changing the amount of fiber in a layer, as well as determining how many layers are reinforced. This control allows engineers to 3D print parts just as strong as needed.



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