3D Systems' Technology Overview and New Applications in Manufacturing, Engineering, Science, and Education

Abstract

Since the inception of 3D printing, an evolutionary process has taken place in which specific user and customer needs have crossed paths with the capabilities of a growing number of machines to create value-added businesses. Even today, over 30 years later, the growth of 3D printing and its utilization for the good of society is often limited by the various users' understanding of the technology for their specific needs. This article presents an overview of current 3D printing technologies and shows numerous examples from a multitude of fields from manufacturing to education.

Developing a Pre-engineering Curriculum for 3D Printing Skills for High School Technology Education

“…In addition, students in the Handmade group relied on manual processing techniques to model their designs. In contrast, 3D printing and modeling can be used to create designs that are difficult to achieve manually, facilitating the realization of innovative ideas (Snyder et al, 2014). Hence, the scores of the 3D Printing group were significantly higher than those of the Handmade group.…”

“…Based on the experiment results, the following suggestions were proposed: 1) Reinforce students' graphic and spatial concepts: Although students were able to understand the concepts of three-view drawings, they found it difficult to produce three-view drawings of their car structures. Students' visuospatial ability, or the skill to perceive relationships between objects in space, is a key predictor of success in STEM curricula (Snyder et al, 2014). STEM can often be overly abstract.…”

“…They do not require a mold and designs can be produced rapidly, making them a perfect tool for realizing innovative ideas (Lipson & Kurman, 2013;Snyder et al, 2014). Taiwan's Executive Yuan vigorously supports the 3D printing industry and collaborates with the Ministry of Education to form policies that incorporate new technologies into STEMoriented curricula in high schools.…”

Application status and Prospect Analysis of digital design and manufacturing technology of mold

“…At the same time, the electric system is adopted to control, control accurately, and work efficiency is higher. At the same time, compared with the traditional methods, the flexible mold also has the following advantages, not only has the vacuum suction column can digital control and positioning, the column can absorb skin parts production and accurate lattice matching, but also a scientific and reasonable adjustment of skin shape and layout, to realize the precise cutting of skin parts edge blending [6] reasonable of parts and assembly. In addition, the flexible mould can effectively avoid the parts in the assembly process of the two trimming, at the same time due to the omission of cutting steps model, improve work efficiency, simplify the manufacturing process, improves the practicability of skin parts, to promote the further development of digital design and manufacturing technology.…”

A Fully Inkjet-Printed 3-D Honeycomb-Inspired Patch Antenna

“…Industrial printheads can deposit kilograms of material per hour making it an attractive process. There are several example of physical objects fabricated by inkjet in [1].…”