Hello, and welcome to MIT'S online Additive Manufacturing
program.
I'm Professor John Hart.
And over the coming weeks, we'll address the fundamentals,
applications, and implications of this exciting and important
field.
Many of you already know that 3D printing, which we now
more broadly call "additive manufacturing"
has quite a long history.
And you may have heard that 3D printing was invented here
at MIT.
Now, that's true referring to a specific process--
binder jetting, which was invented by my colleagues,
Professors Ely Sachs, Michael Cima, and their teams
over 25 years ago.
I started in the field in the late 1980s.
And together with a student, we came up
with a whole bunch of ideas.
And we down-selected to the one that's
now called "binder jetting."
We called it "three-dimensional printing,"
so our first patent application in the field is called
"three-dimensional printing techniques."
I could see how you could make it very fast in particular.
And that was one of the great attractions.
Ink-jet printing, like HP printers, were out.
They were very young.
But you already had print heads with 50 nozzles.
And I just did a little bit of research into ink jet,
and you could see that that field had the potential
to take off and end up with thousands
and thousands of nozzles.
So you could do things massively parallel.
So that was also very attractive.
My focus at that time was mostly on metals and ceramics.
So binder jet fit that bill.
Here's a picture of an object made on one of those first MIT
3D printers.
It's a model of the main building of MIT's campus--
building number 10-- and it's beautiful and intricate
in its geometry.
Yet, it's also a little bit granular,
which we see on 3D printed parts to this day.
And here's a model of the same structure
made on a much more recent 3D printer.
Here, instead of using an ink jet to deposit binder
on layers of powder to build the part, the material of the part
is deposited directly.
This is by jetting of polymer.
And as a result, the part has a much smoother surface finish.
And by looking closely at the part,
we see some of the unique attributes that we find across
3D-printing processes--
of course, making parts without tooling--
this was built from the bottom up--
and also, building parts with complex internal geometries,
internal cavities, like the spaces inside the lobby,
as well as down the hallway that you can see here
from the side view.
The MIT team was among a larger group
of pioneers, who, some of them even earlier invented
many of the additive-manufacturing
processes that are still gaining great traction today.
These pioneers include Hideo Kodama,
who, in Japan around 1980, invented
a process similar to what we now call "stereo lithography."
he demonstrated in one of his publications
this small model of a Japanese-style house
made by consecutive curing and stacking
of photo-polymer sheets, or Ross Householder,
who lived in the Western United States, and in 1979,
filed a patent for building objects out of metal powder.
One of his concepts was to scan a laser over metal powder
to fuse each layer and build an object from the bottom up.
And that's very similar to the processes
of laser sintering and laser melting of polymers
and metals used today.
The short story is that he had the idea
as he drove to and from work every day through the desert,
where he saw the sun beaming down on the dry land.
But unfortunately, he wasn't able to commercialize
the technology, yet later, his patent
was licensed by entrepreneurs who
spun out their research from the University of Texas at Austin
and founded a company in the early 1990s.
The pioneers of 3D printing, in a really significant way,
saw a vision of additive manufacturing
that we're beginning to only realize today.
And why are we so excited about this vision?
Well, let me tell you about some of the recent, exciting
developments.
For instance, we're seeing the emergence
of high-throughput 3D-printing processes for polymers.
And in some cases, these processes
are cost-competitive at quantities
that injection molding can traditionally only
achieve, while enabling complex geometries to be printed
directly without tooling, or more-accessible metal
3D printing.
You may know that metal 3D printing is amazing,
but it's traditionally difficult to use
and is also quite costly.
But now, you can buy machines that
let you put a metal 3D printer in your office
or in your workshop.
And fast industrial metal printing
for true mass production is coming soon as well.
And there are so many really exciting applications
of additive manufacturing, starting with advanced metal
parts for aerospace and automotive applications,
but extending to new consumer products, including shoes
with 3D-printed mid soles, customized eyeglass frames,
and even home fixtures, like this beautiful metal
faucet there's also great innovation in 3D
printing for medical devices, an industry that can truly benefit
from the customization that 3D printing enables,
and therefore, improve patient outcomes
and improve quality of life.
For instance, nearly all in-ear hearing aids
are made by 3D printing today.
The hearing-aid industry transformed
in a period of about 500 days from the old way
to using 3D printing.
And there's hundreds of thousands of hip,
knee, and back implants that have
used metal 3D-printed parts so maybe even a friend or family
member of yours has had orthopedic surgery using
a 3D-printed component to make the implant better.
At large-length scales, we have, for example,
this 3D-printed modular mold for making
composite wind-turbine blades.
Now, the people standing next to it give us an idea of the size.
And the important concept here is not
3D printing the finished part, but 3D printing the tool
to make the finished part-- in this case,
lamination of composite, the material that
forms the wind-turbine blades.
Or there's a 3D-printed pavilion that recently
opened in Nashville, Tennessee.
This is 3D printed in many pieces out of a carbon-fiber
reinforced polymer, a composite.
And then it's finished with an ultraviolet-protective metallic
paint to make it durable and give it
a nice visual appearance.
So together, these developments indicate
that we're beginning to experience
what I call the "industrialization
of additive manufacturing."
That means today's AM technologies
are achieving greater production volumes and much
higher quality than ever before.
And the application space of AM is growing rapidly
and reaches across the product lifecycle
in many different industries.
Design tools for additive manufacturing
also becoming more widely available,
and more importantly, much easier to use than before.
And many partnerships have formed
to accelerate the development and adoption of AM.
These include between established large companies
in materials, software, and other areas,
and also, small and medium companies,
including really fast-moving, exciting startups.
And there is great academic research
across many fields in 3D printing.
And research along with entrepreneurship
are injecting new ideas and exciting momentum
into the field.
So all these things boil down together
to growing confidence, demonstrated value,
and once again, that we're turning the corner
from prototyping to production.
Now, if there is one word to me that sums it all up,
that word is "rethink," that the current and future capabilities
of additive manufacturing compel us
to rethink how we design, produce, deliver,
and service products across the lifecycle.
And it's still very early.
And as we'll see, the answers are often quite complex,
but we're compelled to begin to figure it out.