The primary goal of 3D printing is to create items with minimal material usage. In the industrial sector, products are mass-produced at a low cost through techniques such as injection molding, which ensures that no material is wasted. This one-step manufacturing process saves time and associated costs, as well as reducing material costs by using only the amount of material needed for the part, with little to no waste. Although purchasing 3D printing equipment can be expensive, you can avoid this cost by outsourcing your project to a 3D printing service company.
Designers are using 3D printers to quickly create models and prototypes of products, but they are also increasingly being used to make final products. Items made with 3D printers include shoe designs, furniture, wax pieces for jewelry making, tools, tripods, gifts, novelties, toys, automotive and aviation parts, sculptures, architectural models, fragile artifacts, dinosaur skeletons and other fossils. You can even find simple and practical 3D printer objects in our gallery. Moreover, large machines based on 3D printing technology are being developed for construction materials such as concrete.
The first 3D printers to come to market in the mid-1990s used FDM (a term registered by Stratasys) and most 3D printers aimed at consumers, hobbyists and schools still use this technique. PETG has become one of the most widely used 3D printing materials due to its balanced combination of properties. If you don't want to create your own 3D files, you can download them from 3D object databases such as MakerBot's Thingiverse. Research into the health and safety issues of 3D printing is still in its early stages due to the recent proliferation of 3D printing devices.
Instead of building a part from multiple components, 3D printing allows you to create an item as a complete component, reducing lead times and material waste. For example, around twenty individual parts that previously needed to be welded together were consolidated into a 3D printed component that weighs 25% less and is five times stronger. This appears to be the first patent to describe 3D printing with rapid prototyping and controlled on-demand pattern manufacturing. Large companies such as UPS have introduced 3D printing services and some traditional printers have added on-demand 3D printing to their repertoire. Liquid additive manufacturing (LAM) is a 3D printing technique that deposits a liquid or high viscous material (e.g., from a technological perspective, 3D printing is a consequence of traditional printing, in which a layer of material (usually ink) is applied.
In the context of FFF 3D printing, you can see that the terms “3D printing material” and “3D printing filament” are used interchangeably. With current 3D printers, it is possible to print replacement parts for items such as TV remote control battery covers. In the 1980s, 3D printing techniques were considered suitable only for the production of functional or aesthetic prototypes; at that time it was more appropriately referred to as rapid prototyping. Thermal degradation during 3D printing of resorbable polymers has been studied for surgical sutures and parameters can be adjusted to minimize degradation during processing. Additionally, due to the non-linear nature of photoexcitation, the gel cures to a solid only where the laser was focused while the remaining gel is washed away.
