Advancements in Additive Manufacturing

𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐢𝐝𝐞𝐚 𝐨𝐟 𝟑𝐃 𝐩𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐡𝐚𝐬 𝐣𝐮𝐬𝐭 𝐛𝐞𝐞𝐧 𝐟𝐥𝐢𝐩𝐩𝐞𝐝 𝐨𝐧 𝐢𝐭𝐬 𝐡𝐞𝐚𝐝. Instead of printing metal, a team of scientists in Switzerland grew it from a gel – and the result is 20x stronger than previous methods. Using a water-based hydrogel as a scaffold, researchers at EPFL (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne) created complex structures that can be infused with metal salts. After several rounds of soaking and heating, the gel vanishes – leaving behind dense, ultra-strong metal or ceramic. Traditional metal 3D printing often results in porous structures with serious shrinkage. This new method dramatically reduces those flaws, producing durable, precisely shaped components with only 20% shrinkage. It also opens the door to building with a wide range of materials – the same gel template can be used to grow iron, silver, copper, or even advanced composites. The technique could revolutionize how we make complex, high-performance parts for energy systems, biomedical devices, and next-gen electronics. It’s also a shift in mindset: rather than designing around the limits of printing materials, this approach lets researchers build first, and choose the material later. The team is already working on automating the process, aiming to bring this breakthrough into real-world manufacturing. Read the study "𝐻𝑦𝑑𝑟𝑜𝑔𝑒𝑙‐𝐵𝑎𝑠𝑒𝑑 𝑉𝑎𝑡 𝑃ℎ𝑜𝑡𝑜𝑝𝑜𝑙𝑦𝑚𝑒𝑟𝑖𝑧𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛 𝑜𝑓 𝐶𝑒𝑟𝑎𝑚𝑖𝑐𝑠 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑀𝑒𝑡𝑎𝑙𝑠 𝑤𝑖𝑡ℎ 𝐿𝑜𝑤 𝑆ℎ𝑟𝑖𝑛𝑘𝑎𝑔𝑒𝑠 𝑣𝑖𝑎 𝑅𝑒𝑝𝑒𝑎𝑡𝑒𝑑 𝐼𝑛𝑓𝑢𝑠𝑖𝑜𝑛 𝑃𝑟𝑒𝑐𝑖𝑝𝑖𝑡𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛." 𝐴𝑑𝑣𝑎𝑛𝑐𝑒𝑑 𝑀𝑎𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑖𝑎𝑙𝑠, 2025 https://lnkd.in/eian6kVx

How a 130-year-old company reduced expenses by 75% and increased their annual production by over 50% with large-format additive manufacturing One of the oldest foundry techniques in heavy machinery manufacturing just got a serious upgrade. At JC Steele, a global leader in stiff extrusion machinery for industries from ferro alloys to wallboard, traditional foundry sand casting is meeting large-format Additive Manufacturing. Using the BigRep ONE, JC Steele now prints the patterns for their sand casting molds - faster, smarter, cleaner. The results speak for themselves: 75% cost reduction, 50% faster production cycles. Introducing AM into our production has greatly improved our operations,” says Chris Watts, Pattern Shop Supervisor. “We’ve eliminated the longest, most error-prone steps: manual pattern design, interpreting drawings, and managing waste in the foundry. The takeaway? Marrying a century-old foundry process with cutting-edge 3D printing doesn’t just modernize - it transforms. Design iterations are faster, workflows leaner, and the path from idea to finished mold is smoother than ever. For manufacturers still on the fence: the future of heavy industrial tooling isn’t just digital. It’s digitally empowered foundry work. #3Dprinting #foundry

Additive Manufacturing - Shift from Prototyping to Mission-Critical Production Most people still frame additive manufacturing as a faster way to prototype parts. That framing is now outdated. This week, Chromatic 3D Materials successfully tested a 3D-printed rocket propellant capable of handling more than 1,800 PSI combustion pressure. The breakthrough wasn’t the printer. It was the ability to manufacture mission-critical propulsion systems with new geometries, lower weight, and dramatically faster production cycles. The deeper signal is that additive manufacturing is moving upstream in the value chain. For years, the industry sold efficiency. Now it is selling strategic capability. When supply chains become geopolitical assets, the ability to locally produce complex aerospace and defense components becomes more valuable than marginal cost savings. The winners won’t be printer companies. They’ll be the platforms controlling materials science, digital inventories, and distributed production networks. Recent consolidation across the sector points in the same direction. Investors should stop evaluating additive manufacturing as industrial tooling. The category is evolving into a resilience layer for critical industries. Founders building around advanced materials, defense manufacturing, and on-demand production infrastructure are operating in a much larger market than most forecasts capture. The next decade of manufacturing may look less like factories and more like software-defined production. #AdditiveManufacturing #DefenseTech #AdvancedManufacturing #IndustrialTech #3DPrinting https://lnkd.in/gzsrDPAe

I have to admit… If someone had shown me this suspension component 20 years ago, I probably would have assumed it belonged on a spaceship. Now it’s becoming reality. The interesting part isn’t that it’s 3D printed. It’s that it looks nothing like what most engineers would design by hand. For decades, engineering was often constrained by manufacturing methods. Cast it. Machine it. Weld it. Stamp it. Today, software can optimize a component for loads, stiffness, packaging space, and weight, then additive manufacturing can produce shapes that would have been nearly impossible before. The result? A suspension component that looks more like something nature designed than something created in CAD. Less material. Less weight. Potentially better performance. The biggest question is no longer “Can we design it?” It’s “Can we build millions of them economically?” That’s where the next chapter of automotive engineering will be written. The future of lightweighting may not look like traditional engineering at all. Aaaaaand - that’s what makes it exciting. 📸 Photo credit: Pinterest #Engineering #Automotive #VehicleDevelopment #Lightweighting #AdditiveManufacturing #3DPrinting #Suspension #Innovation #FutureOfMobility #AutomotiveEngineering

Engineers can print a child’s airway splint inside a jar of gel. No supports. No extra plastic to prop it up. They drew it in open space and the gel held the shape until it set. For years, 3D printing has had one constant problem: gravity. Print an overhang and it sags. Print a bridge and it droops. So we add supports, then snap them off and throw them away. Printing inside a yield-stress gel flips that. What standard printing forces you to do: ↳ Build layer by layer on a flat bed ↳ Spend 30–50% extra material on supports ↳ Avoid complex internal channels ↳ Watch soft materials slump under their own weight What gel printing allows: ↳ Print upward, sideways, even in midair ↳ Skip supports entirely ↳ Make branches, knots, and enclosed paths ↳ Keep delicate bioinks suspended until they solidify The best example is the one that matters most. A child who needs a custom airway splint doesn’t have to accept a simplified design “because the printer can’t do it.” Surgeons can match the patient’s CT scan—curves, branches, everything. The gel holds each turn while the material sets, then rinses away with water. The same method is making soft robotic tentacles with internal fluid channels, bio-inspired grippers, and vessel-like networks for lab-grown tissue. Where it goes first: ↳ Patient-specific implants that fit the body exactly ↳ Soft robots with shapes you couldn’t print before ↳ Aerospace parts once the materials clear certification Medicine leads because each part can be worth $10,000+. And the real change isn’t a new printer. It’s a new rule set. We’ve been designing for “down.” Now we can design for the shape we actually need. __________ Inspired by: Brunel et al. (2024), Advanced Healthcare Materials, on embedded 3D bioprinting of collagen in microgel baths — and related work in support‑bath printing, soft robotics, and patient‑specific implants.

🎥 𝗜𝘁 𝗹𝗼𝗼𝗸𝘀 𝗹𝗶𝗸𝗲 𝘀𝗰𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗳𝗶𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻, 𝗯𝘂𝘁 𝗶𝘁’𝘀 𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘆 𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗹 𝗲𝗻𝗴𝗶𝗻𝗲𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗴. 🚀 What you’re seeing isn’t a concept from a futuristic film. It’s a real-world challenge in Directed Energy Deposition (DED). When pushing for high deposition rates in thin-walled structures, buckling becomes a serious issue. And the real problem? It often occurs after the print is finished. Even the smartest process control system can’t prevent what it can’t predict. 💡 The key insight: real-time control isn’t always enough. You need to design for what happens after the process, not just during it. In this study, Procada AB printed a thin-walled demonstrator to compare two strategies for increasing stiffness: 📐 A biaxially corrugated geometry on one side, lightweight and efficient. 🧱 A simple wall thickening on the other, traditional, but heavier. The result revealed more than just mechanical differences. It showed a clear shift in mindset. Build-to-print is not enough in additive manufacturing. What we really need is build-to-spec thinking. Because designs made for sheet metal don’t automatically translate to additive. And in many cases, they shouldn’t. They deserve a redesign that fully leverages what AM can offer. ✈️ If you’re working in aerospace, defense or high-performance engineering, here’s the real question: Are you truly designing for additive manufacturing, or just printing legacy ideas with new tools? #AdditiveManufacturing #DED #DesignForAM #Aerospace #Buckling #StructuralStiffness #BuildToSpec #EngineeringExcellence #AdvancedManufacturing #FutureOfManufacturing

3D-Printed Concrete: Reinventing Strength and Speed in Construction What if houses could be printed, layer by layer and still resist heavy blows with a few-kilogram hammer? That’s what 3D-printed concrete homes are beginning to prove. 3D concrete printing (3DCP) uses robotic extrusion to build structures additively, eliminating traditional formwork and enabling complex geometry with minimal waste. Thanks to advances in mix design (cement + sand + admixtures) and printing control, printed concrete can reach compressive strengths comparable with “normal” concrete — often in the 36–57 MPa range. Beyond just compressive strength, recent studies on full-scale 3D-printed walls report a slightly higher wall-to-material strength ratio compared to traditional masonry — likely because digital printing ensures tight tolerances, uniform layering, and quality control impossible with hand-crafted formwork. Why this matters: • Faster builds — 3DCP can cut construction time dramatically by eliminating formwork and manual masonry. • Less waste — printing only what’s necessary reduces excess material and environmental footprint. • Structural adequacy — with proper design and reinforcement (e.g. fibers or steel where needed), a 3D-printed structure can meet load and durability requirements for residential use. At the same time, 3D-printed concrete is not magic. Its layered nature can create anisotropy: strength and durability may vary depending on load direction and how well the inter-layer bond is cured. That means proper mixture design and curing are critical to avoid weak “cold joints.” Still — the video showing a 3D-printed house taking hammer hits without crumbling isn’t just marketing-showmanship. It illustrates a deeper potential: to build affordable, durable housing faster, with less waste, and with precision that traditional casting or masonry cannot match. This could reshape how we think about residential and small-scale commercial construction in coming decades. As engineers, we stand at the cusp of a transition: from cast-in-place and brick-and-mortar to digital, robot-driven construction — where concrete homes are “printed,” not poured. Have you or your colleagues tried 3D-printed concrete on a real project? What surprised you most about its performance? 🎥 by mygreek_3dhouse_project (IG)

I’m in the mood to break some manufacturing myths today. 🛠️ There is one rule people treat as absolute law: start with 3D printing, and once your volume gets high enough, switch to injection molding because it’s cheaper per unit. It makes perfect sense on a spreadsheet. But on the factory floor, the math is completely different. At Prusa, we run one of the largest 24/7 3D print farms in the world right alongside our own injection molding lines. We see the real data every single day. Take the display case on our printers, for example. The 3D-printed part cost us around €0.25. The injection-molded version costs €0.18, and the mold itself was roughly €6,000. If you look at the graph, it takes about 80,000 units to break even and recoup those tooling costs. But unit cost is not the end of the story. We didn't make the switch just to save seven cents. The display case is large, and printing tens of thousands of them was taking up a massive amount of time. Moving it to injection molding cleared a bottleneck. This is the power of a true hybrid approach. By moving mature, high-volume parts to molding, we instantly freed up our print farm. Now, those printers can do what they do best: produce parts that actually NEED to be printed, things that change often or require fast iteration. You don't have to choose just one technology; you use both to balance the factory. In fact, we lean into this hybrid model so much that we have other parts in our factory where we chose injection molding even though the unit cost actually went up. It sounds crazy, I know. We are currently putting together a deep dive with all our internal data on exactly why we did this, so keep an eye out for it soon! 👀 Until then, I want to hear your experience. Molding, printing, or a hybrid of both? And why? What metric do you apply? 👇 #Manufacturing #3DPrinting #InjectionMolding #Engineering #Prusa #HybridManufacturing

Apple just gave the entire AM industry a huge push, and many still haven’t realized the true impact. By now, everyone in Additive Manufacturing has heard the news: the Apple Watch now includes titanium components produced with metal Powder Bed Fusion. But this announcement is far more significant than another “new application” story we see almost daily. This is the first metal AM consumer product to exceed one million parts per year, a scale previously unseen outside medical devices. And consumer electronics, especially at Apple’s level, demand the highest possible standards for quality and consistency. For Apple to commit to PBF is a massive validation of the technology, boosting its visibility and credibility far beyond its traditional aerospace and medical strongholds. So what does this mean for AM? Based on public information of the type of machine, build plate configuration and other available data, we at AMPOWER estimate that around 50 PBF machines are needed to produce Apple’s annual volume of titanium watch cases. Only a handful of serial applications outside medical ever reach this level of demand for a single product. Titanium use in the consumer electronics market is currently estimated at roughly 5,000 tons, depending on the source. Apple’s watch volumes represent only a small portion of that total. But Apple’s decision to publicly highlight its use of PBF will accelerate adoption across watches, laptops, and smartphone housings. A big question is: Will this extend to stainless and other metals some day? This could trigger strong growth in consumer electronics AM, with China likely becoming a key driver of this expansion. The AM industry should view this moment for what it is: a major milestone and a signal of what is coming next.

3D printing is quietly revolutionizing our labs Not so long ago, if you wanted to centrifuge flasks in a rotor like this one, you’d be out of luck. The standard inserts simply didn’t exist. You either had to buy expensive custom accessories (if available at all) or transfer the cells in falcons bottles etc which is extra plastic used. 👉 But today? A quick 3D print of a well-designed adaptor, and the “impossible” becomes possible. That’s the beauty of additive manufacturing in science: It lowers barriers. It accelerates innovation. It puts problem-solving literally in the hands of every researcher. From centrifuge adaptors to tube holders, from pipette organizers to microfluidic chips — 3D printing empowers us to create what we need, when we need it. No long waits, no inflated costs, no compromise. For me, this is more than a convenience. It’s a mindset shift: Instead of asking “What’s available?”, we start asking “What can we make?” And that question opens doors. 🚀 Have you used 3D printing to solve a lab problem? I’d love to hear your examples — maybe we can build a small library of DIY solutions together.