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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ETH researchers produced complex and highly porous glass objects using a special resin that can be cured with UV light in a novel glass photopolymerization process. Although it is very common (or maybe because of that) glass is the hardest material to effectively 3D print. In the limited number of…
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Children today are growing up in a much more tech-oriented world than past generations. Broadly, this will mean that people will become technologically literate from a much younger age, which could pave the way for continuing waves of digital innovations. Of course, a big part of engaging kids in tech…
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Researchers at Rice University’s Brown School of Engineering have 3D printed lightweight plastic structures that have hardness properties similar to diamond. In an impressive experiment, the team shot bullets at the cubic 3D printed structures with barely any effect. How have the researchers created bulletproof plastic cubes? The answer is…
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A new technique called MM3D (multimaterial multi-nozzle 3D) printing developed by Harvard’s Wyss Institute researchers uses high-speed pressure valves to achieve rapid, continuous, and seamless switching between up to eight different printing materials. This new technique enables the creation of complex shapes in a fraction of the time currently required…
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A team of influential players in the AM industry are coming together to develop a new high-strength and lightweight aluminum alloy for the aerospace and automotive industries. Materials expert Oerlikon will be working alongside industrial gases company Linde and the Technical University of Munich (TUM) to pioneer the new 3D…
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Israeli ceramic 3D printing company XJet is bringing its innovative NanoParticle Jetting Technology (NPJ) to yet another customer: KU Leuven University in Belgium. The installation of the Carmel 1400 3D printer at the university marks the first time XJet’s technology has been adopted by a European academic institution. Fittingly, KU…
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A team of researchers from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY has achieved a breakthrough in the ability to 3D bioprint living, vascularized skin tissue. The team presented the new technique for producing skin tissue with integrated blood vessels in the journal Tissue Engineering Part A. The research project…
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UK-based infrastructure company Amey is the latest company exploring the use of additive manufacturing for the maintenance of the transportation industry. Unlike other companies we’ve seen, which are using 3D printing to produce spare or replacement parts for trains, Amey is looking into the technology for maintaining and renewing train tracks.…
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GE Additive has signed a five-year cooperative R&D agreement (CRADA) with the DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) aimed at establishing AM process, materials and software that accelerate the industrialization and adoption of the manufacturing technology. Though GE and ORNL have cooperated in the past (they signed a CRADA in…
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3D printing chocolate is nothing new. We’ve seen ample examples of extrusion-based technologies depositing melted chocolate layer by layer to build up all kinds of simple shapes. Recently, however, a team from the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) has made a breakthrough in chocolate 3D printing, moving away…
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