ADDITIVE MANUFACTURING

What is additive manufacturing? Applications, technologies and benefits

If you are in manufacturing, or in your company, manufacturing is an important part of the
production process, you probably know about additive manufacturing. If not, let me tell you
that you are missing out on a technology (or set of technologies) that could greatly speed up
the way your company produces, in addition to many other advantages.

What is additive manufacturing?

Additive manufacturing refers to the set of technologies that allow the manufacture of objects
in a sequential manner, usually layer by layer.

It is defined as additive because the material is added sequentially, as opposed to more

traditional (subtractive) manufacturing where material is removed from a solid block until the
final part is left. Examples of subtractive manufacturing are turning/lathing, CNC or general
cutting processes such as laser cutting, water jet cutting, machine cutting, etc.

In this way, multiple layers of a material are stacked until they give the definitive form to the
object that is being built. The type of material, the height of the layers, the way in which the
layers are deposited one on the other can vary.
As you see, although we call it additive manufacturing, we are referring to a very vast world,
which actually encompasses extremely diverse technologies.
Perhaps the specific term “additive manufacturing” was unknown until today, but surely this
one sounds more familiar to you: 3D printing. Due to the similarity that this process has with
paper printing everyone knows, where printing is done line by line until an image is formed,
this alternative term has been abandoned and many people call additive manufacturing 3D
printing.

Actually, 3D printing as such is only one of the varieties of additive manufacturing, but as a
concept it helps us visualize how this family of technologies works and how it can make
manufacturing faster and cheaper.

Advantages of additive manufacturing

Well, now that we know what additive manufacturing is, surely you can imagine many
advantages that these technologies can have over more conventional means of manufacturing.

Obviously each technology within additive manufacturing has its own advantages over the
others, but by sharing a methodology they also share a number of advantages

Reducing the amount of material used

It may be obvious, but by depositing just the right amount of material instead of removing
material from a solid block, we do not generate waste.

Ability to manufacture objects with complex geometries

If you’ve ever designed a part to be made by more traditional means such as CNC, you’ll
know that many geometries are literally impossible to make. This is why it is common to
divide the part into several smaller parts to avoid complex geometries, requiring a subsequent
assembly and increased design and manufacturing time.

Additive manufacturing allows us to make parts that would be practically impossible to

achieve with other means, with extremely complex geometries.

Parts such as the one shown above are usually manufactured to demonstrate the technical
capabilities of additive manufacturing equipment, making clear their advantage over other
means of manufacturing.

Reduced manufacturing cost for small series

While the cost of manufacturing varies greatly depending on which additive manufacturing
technology we use, in general the price is significantly lower than with traditional
manufacturing.

The graph above shows that the price for short series is lower in additive manufacturing. It is
also true that the price practically does not fall with the number of units, as is the case with
subtractive manufacturing or injection moulding.

Higher speed and lower prototyping costs

As we have seen in the previous section, additive manufacturing is the cheapest technology
when the number of units of a part we want to produce is low. This is why it is ideal for rapid
prototyping, where we want to make only one or a few units of a part in order to check for
possible failures.

This also fits in with the well-known fast methodologies such as Scrum, where the
development of a product requires iterative prototyping until a definitive version is reached.

In addition to being cheaper, it is also more accessible. Additive manufacturing equipment

such as 3D FDM printers that we will talk about later, are very cheap to acquire, maintain and
operate, so it is viable for almost any company to have its own prototyping workshop, unlike
what happens with equipment such as CNC or multi-axis milling machines.

As a summary we leave you with this image, where you can see where the additive
manufacturing, and more specifically the 3D printing, is located, compared to other
manufacturing models.

To manufacture few and highly complex parts, choosing additive manufacturing will help
you save costs, prototype faster and therefore earlier and cheaper in the market.
Application cases
Few technologies that can be used to make your production processes faster, cheaper or more
efficient, so now we’re going to show you some concrete cases where additive manufacturing
can be an amazing advantage.

Rapid prototyping
3D FDM printing specifically can be incredibly useful as it allows you to quickly produce
parts to test their functionality. In particular, in Bitfab we are experts in rapid prototyping
using 3D printing, so from our experience we can say that this technology can revolutionize
the way many companies work.