"This will be the first far-reaching American show that deals with all manufacturing technologies where there is a clear understanding that additive manufacturing has a presence," explained Dave Burns, president and COO of Pittsburgh-based metal printer, ExOne.
Growing Pains
"There is a lot of excitement in this area," noted Paul Warndorf, vice president of manufacturing technology at AMT, which is sponsoring IMTS. "It still has a lot of innovation yet to go, though. A lot of maturation yet to do. I think that's the neat part about additive manufacturing: it still has a place to put its mark yet."
This maturity issue is the last hurtle left to cross on the way to mainstream success -- and one that has dogged the industry from the start. Now, with its new place of prominence, this issue -- and all of the questions it implies -- is coming to light more than ever and putting industry's mechanics to the test.
"Additive manufactured parts are already going into production vehicles today, whether it's for air or space or ground or under the sea," explained Tim Shinbara, technical director at AMT. "But as more folks realize what the technology can do, then we start down the path of asking important questions like how reliable are they? How repeatable is the process? How many machines can you do? What does your industrial base look like? What do your warranties look like? And so on."
The answers to these questions, he said, are all big question marks.
"This is where you see additive struggling with comparison to traditional manufacturing," he explained. "The hood is being opened and there are things within that machine that are just not robust enough yet for the kind of true demand the manufacturing industry could see."
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A large portion of the additive manufacturing news this year has been following companies' movements along this trajectory, however, bolstering the basic functionality and utility of printed products to meet demand and expectations.
On the polymer side, for example, Minneapolis-based Stratasys changed the form and function of rapid prototype machines this year with its desktop Mojo printer and is gearing up for a merger with Israel-based Objet to become the largest 3-D printing company in the world. This move will dramatically expand the material base and expertise to help move this branch of additive manufacturing up to the next level.
On the metal side, where durability and material integrity issues are already well on the road to certification, the real issue is speed.
"The most important element from our perspective of why a machine will resonate with people is volume metric output time," explained ExOne's Burns. "This is the singular way to drive ourselves more firmly into the industrial marketplace."
To address that at IMTS this year, ExOne is launching a new printing system, M-Flex, which will be capable of producing printed metal, tungsten, glass or ceramic parts at about 7.5 more volume per unit time than previous iterations of the technology.
"The trajectory remains almost geometric upwards in terms of productivity we're seeing out of additive manufacturing units," he said. "We don't really see the ceiling yet that we're going to get to. Because of that we believe we are prying open significantly more market opportunities every time we can offer higher volume per unit time to the market."
