Research & Education
Additive manufacturing is transforming how products are designed, produced, and serviced. AM lets us produce on-demand, without dedicated equipment or tooling. This unparalleled flexibility enables new digital design and production tools that can create components and products with breakthrough performance: in order to truly unlock the potential of AM, research & education is of fundamental importance.
Knowledge of the fundamentals of AM, its design principles, applications, and implications is one of the greatest barriers to its wider adoption. In recent years the key importance of integrating additive manufacturing in educational curricula has begun to be considered worldwide.
Additive manufacturing centered research & education initiatives by both governments and corporations – as well as individuals – have begun to focus on raising the next generation of additive manufacturing designers and engineers.
The main areas of exploration for educational activities are in software and hardware. While AM hardware learning is currently mostly limited to exploring the current additive production process and its applications, the software offers some of the most significant opportunities in terms of learning to fully exploit the AM process in the future.
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Researchers from Northwestern University have been developing a stereolithography-based 3D printing technology that is capable of incredibly high throughputs and large scale prints. Now, the team has unveiled its technology—called HARP (High-Area Rapid Printing)—and revealed that it is just 18 months away from commercializing it. At 13 feet in height,…
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Leonardo da Vinci, the ultimate Renaissance man, was not only a famous painter but a prolific inventor. Today, he is credited with inventing an instrument that measures the speed of wind, proto-flying machines, scuba gear and more. It turns out, the Italian Renaissance polymath was also an apt architect—something which…
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Aeronautics company Airbus has partnered with LM Industries to form a new company dedicated to local mobility and autonomy, Neorizon. The mobility startup will operate a microfactory designed to rapidly and efficiently build products for new transportation and mobility solutions. LM Industries was founded last year by Local Motors, the…
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A team from the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Technology and Advanced Materials (IFAM) has produced a scaled gas turbine demonstrator model using additive manufacturing to showcase both the potentials and limitations of powder bed fusion technologies. The model, a 1:25 scale version of a power generation gas turbine, was almost…
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Every year at the Formnext expo in Frankfurt, the most cutting-edge additive manufacturing technologies, materials, software and applications from around the world are showcased. The event, perhaps more than any other in the additive world, functions as something of a microcosm of the industry and gives us an indication of…
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A joint team of researchers from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and the Chinese University of Hong Kong have unlocked dramatically faster nanoscale 3D printing rates thanks to a new time-based technique for controlling the light from an ultrafast laser. The new approach can reportedly achieve fabrication speeds up…
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Last week, 3D printer manufacturer RIZE became the first company to attain UL 2904 GREENGUARD certification for its RIZE One 3D printer. The certification, which addresses 3D printer particle emissions and safety, followed a multi-year study conducted by the Georgia University of Technology and UL, a leading global safety science…
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A multidisciplinary team from the NYU Tandon School of Engineering has received a $1.2 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to develop autonomous, mobile construction 3D printers. Down the line, the researchers hope that their work will untether 3D printers, so to speak, and enable them to build…
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How to encode and release complex curves in shape-shifting structures is at the center of research led by the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the Harvard Wyss Institute of Biologically Inspired Engineering. Over the past decade, theorists and experimentalists have found inspiration in…
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Researchers from the University of Birmingham in the UK are developing a new 3D printing method for soft materials. The process, called Suspended Layer Additive Manufacturing (SLAM), can be used for biomaterials such as gels and collagens and could have applications in producing artificial implants for the medical sector. 3D…
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