The rise of additive manufacturing

Prof Richard Hague’s desk is littered with a curious smorgasbord of objects: a tiny model jet engine, a diesel-fuel pump housing, a chain-mail vest with a zip down the back, a football shin pad and a tiny skeletal hand. A seemingly random array of objects, but with one important thing in common: they’ve all been built by machines that can be used to print functional components from scratch.

Hague, who heads up Loughborough University’s world-leading Additive Manufacturing Research Group (AMRG), explained that these so-called ’additive’ machines, which use a range of laser-based or advanced printing techniques to build up models layer by layer, have a number of compelling advantages over traditional manufacturing techniques.

Able to build models of mind-boggling geometrical complexity from scratch, they dispense with tooling costs. Plus, there’s very little waste. While traditional ’subtractive’ manufacturing processes often remove up to 95 per cent of the raw material to arrive at a finished component, additive machines only use the material they need to make the part.