3D printing may have an image problem. It's sometimes seen as a hobbyist pursuit—a fun way to build knickknacks from your living room desktop—but a growing number of companies are giving serious thought to the technology to help get new ideas off the ground.
That's literally off the ground in aircraft maker Boeing's case. Thirty thousand feet in the air, some planes made by Boeing are outfitted with air duct components, wiring covers, and other small, general parts that have been made via 3D printing, or, as the process is known in industrial applications, additive manufacturing. The company also uses additive manufacturing with metal to produce prototype parts for form, fit and function tests.
Whether it's the living room or a corporate factory, the underlying principle of 3D printing—additive manufacturing—is the same. It's different from traditional manufacturing techniques such as subtractive or formative manufacturing, which mainly rely on removing material through molding, drilling or grinding. Additive manufacturing instead starts from scratch and binds layers of material sequentially in extremely thin sheets, into a shape designed with 3D modeling software.
Please, we call it "additive manufacturing"
Boeing has been conducting research and development in the area of additive manufacturing since 1997, but the company wants to scale up its processes in the years ahead so it can use the technology to build larger, structural components that can be widely incorporated into military and commercial aircraft.
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