3D printing moves towards the mass market

A cloud-operated multi-cell manufacturing concept offers a glimpse of the future of 3D printing

The various additive manufacturing techniques that have been developed over the past couple of decades or more are now not just well-established tools for their original application area of rapid prototyping, but also for actual production. But in that latter role the take-up of the technology has always been impeded by a number of persistent factors apart from the intrinsic slowness of the fabrication technique itself. These include the fact that the machines tend to be bulky standalone pieces of equipment and that they require manual unloading of finished parts.

But what if those inhibiting factors could be largely abolished? What if additive manufacturing could be carried out by a bank of appropriate machines stacked side by side or on top of each other to create a simultaneous multi-cell production capability for either identical or different parts? What if those cells could operate on an extended unattended basis because they had both a co-located stock of raw material to draw on and could unload finished parts automatically? Also, what if they possessed an integral self-scheduling capability so that manufacturing could be automatically routed to the first available cell? And what if that overall control could be affected by a web-based cloud computing system so that the machines could operate in almost any location, irrespective of where they were managed, to serve local markets and thus greatly reduce the costs of transporting finished goods?