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It allows the production of unique, patient-specific geometries, such as dental crowns and bridges, or custom hip implants.
Engineering professionals will be aware of the trade-off between product variety and cost. AM has already been publicised as the ultimate flexible, reconfigurable and modern manufacturing method, so what is stopping it from taking over?
In some industries, customisation has always been the norm. They are industries in which the customers’ measurements and their preferences are important, such as tailoring, shoemaking and dental laboratory work.
AM can be applied to mass customisation in many more areas, including prototyping, the manufacture of bespoke products and the production of families of products, all at high rate. Prototyping has been delivered by AM for many years, with designers using CAD to produce designs that can be made and tested before full production. Thanks to the growth and development of metal AM, manufacturers are now able to create prototype metal parts that function as the designer intended.
So, if AM production rates increase and costs fall (and they are doing so), then we are not far from a ‘click and print’ facility for parts. Mass customisation can also be used to create bespoke products at scale, particularly in the orthopaedic, hearing aid and dental sectors. A bespoke part produced is generally based on scan data, taken either directly from the patient or indirectly from a mould of their anatomy.
Finally AM can help in the production of families of products based on a parametric CAD file. This allows manufacturers to create a series of products of, perhaps, different sizes, or with amendments to suit their purpose.
We are now also seeing AM used to create serial, sized production runs where the benefit is not in the external customised geometry but in the complex porous materials that can be made.
Multi-functionality in serial parts delivered at production rates – now that’s a real tangible benefit of AM.
Content published by Professional Engineering does not necessarily represent the views of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers.