Digital meets the visible world

The future of 3D printing Digital meets the visible world Gabriela Ehrlich

e-tech attended a presentation by Carl Bass, CEO of Autodesk during CES. Carl Bass has been a pioneer of 3D printing. Below is a summary of his talk.

Intimately linked Bass started by explaining that 3D printing is older than one thinks. It started roughly 25 years ago but its success is directly linked to the progression of the Internet and of the overall digital environment; 3D printing lies at the cross path of the digital and the visible world.

New technologies require new thinking He defended the idea that new technologies such as 3D printing need to be used to do things that we couldn't even conceive of before. In his view taking a new technology to do the same old thing a tiny bit differently is simply not that interesting.

Some challenges to overcome Bass then gave a quick overview of what has been happening in 3D printing over the past few years and some of the shortcomings that need to be addressed if we want to move to the next level. In his words these include:

1. Reliability. Failure rates for 3D printing are insanely high. For those who 3D print all the time there is a certain level of anxiety when they walk over to the printer in the morning to check whether a project successfully printed, often finding that it hasn't.

2. 3D printing quality is low. The resolution is simply not high enough; the quality of parts is not good enough.

3. Speed. 3D printers are simply too slow. If a cube of 10 cm3 takes 1 hour to print, then a cube of double that size (20 cm3) will take 8 hours and one of four times the initial size (40 cm3) will take 64 hours. This is a difficult barrier to remove.

4. Materials. Most of the materials available today are not good enough for the products that are being printed.

A 3D printer in every home? Bass feels that the 3D hype is at its peak. Many people who go out and buy a 3D printer actually end up being disappointed. They get home, print three things and then they don't know what to print next. The workflow and handling of the tools is still too complex.

But Bass also sees this as a business opportunity to do better. He strongly feels that the idea that every home will own a 3D printer is farfetched. 3D printers are noisy; they are not a home device . Instead businesses will develop around the idea of giving the consumer access to the 3D experience without the need for ownership. What Bass thinks will happen is that everybody will have access to 3D printers via a 3D printing service model, either online or locally. It is much more likely that consumers will own scanners, because at the basic level you need a 3D model to 3D print.

Bass also feels that until now consumer 3D printing was overvalued while industrial 3D printing has been underestimated: 3D printing will have the biggest value in industrial added manufacturing .

Small investment, huge flexibility With increasing computing power, design tools, simulation tools and 3D printing, relatively little skill is needed to produce something. In the past, industrial production required massive capital investment and a lot of skill. In 3D printing, shape flexibility is absolute and all that is needed is a little bit of digital craftsmanship. It's all about moving files from here to there and in Bass's view, in the future, even that will need to be simplified.

The next industrial revolution 25 years ago 3D printing was labelled as rapid prototyping. This is still the most widespread use for industrial applications and incredibly useful. Bass feels that one of the places where 3D printing will be applied most is in industrial tooling and fixtures where it will replace injection moulding.

Here a combination of additive and substractive printing will offer a novel way to enable previously impossible designs. This technique allows for example to print metal that will then be melted. The result is a material efficiency and performance that comes from 3D printing and the precision that comes from substractive approaches like machining.

Part of a much bigger set of tools The industrial revolution enabled mass production of high-quality and low-cost products. 3D printing and the whole new world of digital fabrication enables the same level of quality at the same cost but for very low quantities. Tools are built into a workflow that from the start includes 3D printing. But 3D printing is only a part of a much bigger set of technologies which include software, design, and materials and in Bass's view this is where the real industrial revolution will lie.

Revolutionizing computer aided design Bass went on to explain the problems of today's design process. He feels that computer aided design software doesn't really allow the computer to do much in terms of aiding the design. What the computer mostly does is record a design that is already in the head of the designer. People have an idea, design it by giving precise instructions and then test it digitally and then visually. In Bass's words: Design reminds me a bit of the game of battle ship: the engineer says B3 and the analyst says miss the engineer then says G5 and the analyst says miss. Today, design is still very much trial and error' and eventually you run out of time or patience or money or you just accept good enough'.

Thousands of possible design solutions Now, according to Bass there is a complete rethinking of how the computer can support the design effort. With advances in computer processing and bandwidth, the price of computing has fallen so low and is so easily available that there is near infinite computing power.

Now, instead of explicitly drawing geometry or describing a curve or shape, it is possible to explain a problem to a computer at a high level in terms of size, weight, ae

LINK:	http://www.iec.ch/etech/2015/etech_0115/tech-1.htm...
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