How 3D printing is changing the world
The market for 3D printing is witnessing rapid growth in both depth and breadth. Reports estimate global market for 3D printing to cross $49 billion by 2025. Traditional applications such as prototyping are growing. However the primary drivers of growth are a wide variety of new applications. The sudden growth in 3D printing was driven by the expiration of key patents that allowed dozens of small companies to start producing cheap, desktop 3D printers for consumers.
Among the major implication is that businesses all along the supply, manufacturing, and retailing chains need to rethink their strategic and operational options and opportunities. Goods will be infinitely more customised, because altering them won’t require retooling, only tweaking the instructions in the software. Massive customisation may also render advantages previously offered by mass manufacturing and economies of scale useless and this may cause decentralisation of manufacturing from China.
As more people have access to 3D-printing technology, thanks to the open source hardware, easy access to top class 3D modelling and design apps and software, the manufacturing industry is poised to shift from factory floors to your own neighbourhood for many products.
There are many interesting applications of 3D printing in various areas Robotics
‘In Moov’ is the first life-size humanoid robot one can 3D-print and animate. It is replicable on any home 3D-printer and is conceived as a development platform in robotics for universities, laboratories and obbyists.
Architecture
3 D printing is now making it possible to automatically print a single house or a colony of houses, each with possibly a different design. This could be done in a single run, with each house embedded with conduits for electrical, plumbing and air-conditioning.
Food
We may soon see Italy-based pasta maker Barilla equip every restaurant with 3D food printers in a few years. And this is just an example among many others such as ‘cookie printing’, cake printing’.
Art
There is already a lot of 3D-printed art and sculptures exhibited and accessible on the Web.
Health
One of the obvious uses today in healthcare is the 3D printing of bone and cartilage replacements and medical devices.
Automotive
Apart from prototyping for concept car widely employed by car companies, people in the future may possibly 3D-print their own customised car and download the Google self-driving car OS to hit the road!
Our perspective
3D printing is an amazing opportunity to participate in manufacturing in the 21st century; it is certain to fuel a significant small and micro-enterprise revolution across the world, at places which missed the first industrial revolution. And finally, 3D printing, which has already caught the imagination of everyone promising to let loose a manufacturing revolution from our homes has already begun to take off. 3D printers for homes are now available for a couple of hundred dollars (nearly Rs 1500) and America’s first 3-D-printing factory in Louisville with 100 3D printers has begun operations with only one employee to oversee the whole facility per shift. In another first of its kind, UK based startup Open Bionics fitted a person born without a hand with a 3D scanned printed, custom-fitted prosthetic robotic hand.
