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Noah Parrott

Instructor: Malcolm Campbell

English 1103

March 20, 2015

3D Printing the Future.

A hardworking father just returned home from a long day at work. When he turns the

door knob to enter his home, it comes right out of the door, accompanied by a thud as the other

half hits the floor. Realizing the knob is beyond repair the father thinks of how to fix this

dilemma. Does he drive back to town to purchase a new one? Or should he open his computer,

download a free blueprint, and print out a new one, right in the comfort of his home? This could

be a situation that you find yourself in one day and it demonstrates one of the many advantages

that 3D Printing can provide. Given that you have the appropriate materials to meet your needs,

you can use this technology for a wide variety of uses. Ranging from minor home repairs, to

automotive fixes, all the way to toys for children. This technology has rapidly grown in

popularity over the past few years, and will only continue to do so in the future as new uses for it

are thought of. But what is it, and how can this new technology be used for so many different

fields?

3D Printing has been around since the 1980's but has only recently begun to gain

popularity with the general public. When I first heard about 3D Printing I immediately to rushed

to my computer to figure out exactly what it was. What I found instead was a bunch of results for

additive manufacturing and stereolithography instead; imagine my confusion. The reason for that

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is because the all three names are used to describe the same thing, the ability to 3-dimentionally

fabricate objects. Hod Lipson and Melba Kurman, authors of the book Fabricated: The New

World of 3D Printing, describe how this amazing technology works.

The way 3D Printing works is as follows. The 3D printer, guided by instructions in the

design file, squirts out or solidifies powdered, molten or liquid material into a specific flat

pattern. After the first layer solidifies, the 3D 'print head' returns and forms another thin

layer on top of the first one. When the second layer solidifies, the print head returns yet

again and deposits another thin layer on top of that. Eventually, the thin layers build up

and a three-dimensional object forms.

Lipson and Kurman also mentioned another very important aspect of 3D printing, the design file

and computer. Three-dimensional design files are what the 3D printer needs in order to be able to

do anything, without them it is useless. There are countless software applications that can make

compatible files including CAD (Computer Aided Design), modeling and sculpting programs.

There are free versions available as well as versions that

will require a fee and some may be better than others.

3D Printing's Wide Variety of Uses

Just how many fields can 3D printing reach? It

has already been used in the Automotive, Food

Processing, Medical, Aeronautics and Construction

industries as well as the common household.

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Have you ever envisioned yourself riding in a car that came off of a printer? I think it

sounds crazy, but the Local Motors company have actually made it a reality. They printed off a

copy of the world's first 3D printed car, the Strati EV, at the2015 Detroit Auto Show. The

carbon-fiber infused plastic used to create the cars chassis was printed in one sitting. The Strati's

top speed is only 50mph, due to its small electric battery, so you won’t see these kinds of cars

anywhere near faster moving traffic. Frank Markus from Motor Trend Magazine, attended Local

Motor's press conference during the auto show and reported that they foresee this car as a

electric neighborhood vehicle, giving it an approximated price somewhere between $18,000-

$30,000. They also announced the opening of two micro facilities for producing these cars are

going to be built, one in Knoxville, TN and the other in Washington, D.C. (Motor Trend) With

these new factories being erected I wouldn't be surprised if 3D printed cars become more and

more common every year. The automotive industries also uses 3D printing to rapidly prototype

test parts for uses in race cars. The Nissan Motorsports team called upon the 3D printing

company Evok3D to help them quickly develop a prototype for a new driver cooling system,

after one of their drivers had to be pulled from his car due to heat exhaustion. The 3D company

came up with a solution in not months, but weeks. Which shows why many companies use this

technology. Because compared to the traditional prototyping approach, its faster and the pieces

are less expensive to produce (Grunewald).

The food industry is also taking advantage of the new trend. The food printers work in the same

way as the others do, except that instead of putting in plastics to build with, you use ingredients.

Unfortunately you won’t be able to print an entire cooked meal just yet, 3D printing hasn’t quite

gone that far when it comes to foods. What is can do is print with chocolates, sugars, dough,

essentially simple dessert ingredients. 3D Systems is a company started by the inventor of 3D

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Printing, Charles Hull. They have recently created a printer that will print out foods, called the

Foodini. The Foodini has the capability to print shapes in chocolate and sugar as well as whole

objects like wedding cake toppers, pizzas, and cookies (McFarland). One thing I find fascinating

is that you can create any design that you can imagine made entirely out of chocolate. You could

print out a personalized heart for valentine's day, a little house, or even a bust of your own face

made entirely out of chocolate! But it's not limited to chocolate either, you can make intricate

sugar cubes to add to drinks. Unfortunately this savory machine will not be released to the public

until late 2015.

Now that I can make a chocolate statue of myself what else can there be left for 3D printing to

do? How about build an entire house? One important limitation that 3D printers encounter is

their size, meaning that you can only print objects that will fit inside the printing area. So if you

were able to increase the scale of the printer, which in turn increases the maximum size a printed

object can be. and I found one Chinese company that has take full advantage of this. WinSun

Decoration Design Engineering Co., has definitely made its name known in the world of 3D

printing with their 6.6 by 10 meter tall custom printer. The printer took the company twelve

years to develop, and since it has created: ten houses in under twenty-four hours, an apartment

complex which claimed the title of World's Tallest 3D printed Building, and a mansion. Each of

the ten houses cost just around $5000 each, and the 1,100 square meter mansion only cost

$160,000. Although, due to their printer not being big enough to encompass the height of the

apartment building or the sheer size of the mansion, the parts had to be printed separately and

assembled later on (Stott).

If you have ever seen the TV show or recent movies about the popular Star Trek

franchise, then it would be easy to make a comparison between the show's "Replicator" and

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today's 3D printers. In the show the crew members would use the Replicator to create meals or

parts or even parts or tools that were needed on the ship, almost instantly. Sounds a lot like the

what we can do today with our 3D printers. Thinking back about the show made me wonder, can

we use our printers in space too? I found that NASA has already developed and flown a 3D

printer to the international space station(ISS). They developed a printer that can function in

micro-gravity, which will allow the astronauts to manufacture any tool that they might need

while onboard the ISS. This advancement not only benefits the astronauts but it benefits those of

us on the ground as well. Since they are now able to manufacture what they need, this will cut

down of the number of replacement parts that need to be sent up via shuttles. Also by comparing

items printed in micro-gravity to the ones printed in earth's gravity, researchers are able to make

advancements to the way the we use printers on earth (NASA).

There are over 123,000 people in the U.S. on the organ transplant waiting list, more than

6,5000 of them die per year before receiving a transplant (American Transplant Foundation). 3D

Printing has the potential to tremendously impact the medical field and they call it bioprinting.

The National Center for Biotechnology Information(NCBI) has compiled the list of uses that 3D

printing has into about five categories: tissue and organ fabrication, creating prosthetics,

implants, anatomical models, and pharmaceutical research(NCBI). 3D printers are used to print a

biodegradable scaffolding, which is then used as an area to grow tissues from patients cells.

These could be skin tissues, which are the easiest to reproduce, or organ tissues which are harder

to reproduce. Once the tissues grow to completely encompass the scaffolding, the scaffolding

begins to degrade leaving only the cells that have grown into the correct structure. The printers

have the accuracy to print with the patients cells, what is referred to as bio-ink, into the precise

locations that they need to be. Although bioprinting is still in its early stages, scientists have been

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able to 3D print: a knee meniscus, heart valve, spinal disc, different types of cartilage and bone,

and an artificial ear (NCBI). The hope is that we will one day we will be able to bioprint whole

organs, which would solve the organ shortage problem that we face today.

With all of these examples of 3D printing's uses, it brings a question to my mind. If we

have all these different ways to use printing, what materials are we allowed to use with a 3D

printer? I have come to the conclusion that there is no correct answer, and there are a few

reasons. First, as previously mentioned, there are many uses of this technology and with each one

of them being different there is no way that you could use the same materials across them all.

You wouldn’t use biodegradable structure material to build a house with, just like you wouldn’t

make a body part out of concrete. Second, with this technology working its way into different

fields, people are constantly creating new and improved polymers and compounds to best suit

their needs. These range from: sugar for the Foodini, plastics for kids toys, and metals for

jewelry, all the way to concrete for houses, and carbon-fiber infused plastic for making the Strati

EV. So there is an infinitely growing pool of materials to choose from. Third, depending on the

material that you are printing with you will have to have a printer that can handle it. For example

the Foodini wouldn’t work if you tried to load it with concrete because the nozzle head would be

to small, since its adapted for using ingredients that aren't so thick. Now that we have established

the fact that there arent a set number of materials, we can talk about the most commonly used

among the everyday consumer. The normal consumer will own a printer that either works with

ABS or PLA filament. The main differences between the two are as follows: ABS is petroleum

based so it give smells simply like hot plastic when heated during printing. It is preferred by

engineers and in use in professional and mechanical applications due to its strength, flexibility,

and higher temperature resistance. It requires a heated print bed, som some printers aren't able to

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use it. PLA is more ecologically friendly compared to ABS, being made from plant products, it

outs off a sweet scent when heated in printing. It was a wider range of colors and a naturally

glossy look, making it ideal for use in small home projects, schools and hobbyists. It as a low

heat tolerance so if an PLA printed object is left in the car on a hot day, it will become

misshapen (Chilson). There are also other plastics made available by other companies, again, it

will depend on what materials your printer can handle.

Drawbacks of 3D printing?

There are many applications of 3D printing that I had never considered before that I have

learned about. I had only recently heard of this "new" technology craze and come to find out, it's

already advanced much further than I could have imagined. It can build parts for my car, it can

make me tasty treats, and it can even put a roof over my head, a potentially big one at that. 3D

printing has also been impacting individual households. With websites such as MakerBot

Thingiverse and Shapeways, people can now share and download designs with one another.

These are active communities where people are showing others what they've taken the time to

design, and also being able to enjoy and use others ideas. But as nice as that sounds , sometimes

your designs can stir up controversy.

Vice, a pop culture news coverage company, interviewed Cody Wilson, the founder of

Defense Distributed and Defcad.org, to ask him about his plans for 3D printing. Wilson and a

handful of colleagues started Defense Distributed in order to design and distribute the plans for

gun components. Their main focus had been on the lower section of an AR-15, which is a semi-

automatic assault rifle, as well as high capacity magazines. One of their big struggles was that

the designs would break quickly due to the inability to handle the recoil from the weapon, but

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recently Wilson and his team have produced a lower section that is capable of firing over six-

hundred rounds (Wilson). Gun components are not the only thing that they have made, the team

designed and tested an entirely printed 3D handgun named The Liberator. Files for the liberator

were distributed online by Defense Distributed, along with various other sites, and were

downloaded over one hundred thousand times before plans were removed by the State

Department (Forbes).

Wilson is a self-proclaimed crypto-anarchist, or someone who expresses anarchistic

ideas via the internet. He also has strong political views against the new gun control bans and

regulations and believes that by distributing his files that he is fighting against them. Wilson

launched the website Defcad in response to having all of his design files removed from

Thingiverse due to a violation in their Terms of Service. He created Defcad as a place where

people could share and download design files for weapon parts freely. Wilson refuses to give on

his endeavors despite multiple setbacks, struggling to get approval on a federal firearms license,

having a newly purchased printer repossessed by a company after learning of the intended use,

he continues to monitor the advancements in 3D printing and tries to improve his

designs(Wilson).

Despite the controversy over production of firearms, 3D Printing could open many doors

when it comes to new forms of revenue for businesses as well as new possibilities for consumers.

Imagine logging onto a website like Amazon looking buy a lamp, you could scroll through a list

of predesigned templates or you could design your very own. With 3D printing companies would

no longer have a designated set of items to choose from, since the printer can print whatever you

tell it to, it almost infinitely widens the span of designs and options that you could choose from.

Simply pick a design you want, complete your order and companies can print it and have it

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shipped to you. The Harvard Business Review says that they believe that many goods will be

produced close to where they are sold, therefore eliminating the need to pay high shipping costs.

They also predict that China will have to give up the spot of being the world's powerhouse

manufacturer. But they won't be the loser, as every country will cater to its domestic population,

and China has a very large population(Harvard Business Review). Since there will no longer be a

need to outsource production to China, many production sources will return to the U.S..

But there may be one slight problem, even though 3D printing will bring production

back to the country, does that necessarily mean that the jobs will come back as well? If the

printers will be producing items then will there still be a need for the manufacturing sector?

Brian Krassenstien, an author for 3DPrint.com doesn't think so. He believes that the assembly

line jobs won't be needed anymore because everything can be automated. With 3D printers

creating parts and robotic arms putting them together, the manufacturing sector as well at the

retail sector will see a big cuts in employment. He also believes that with the cuts in

employment, it will cost companies less to produce items which will lower costs for the

consumers, and possibly lowering the cost of living as well. It's unfortunate that new technology

tends to destroy jobs, simply because there is no need for human workers to be doing a job that a

computerized machine could do more effieiently and for little to no cost. That being said,

machines will always malfunction, so with the increase in the number of machines used, there

will need to be an increase in the number of people who can service and repair those machines.

So in the long run many of the jobs lost to employment cuts, are potentially made up for by the

wave of new jobs that follows new technology (3DPrint).

Layer by Layer, 3D printing is changing how we do things. Automotives, Aeronautics,

Construction and Medical fields; all of these fronts have taken on this rapidly advancing

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technology and they are able to accomplish many incredible tasks with it. From potentially

solving the organ donor wait list problem, and building cheap and effective houses in third world

countries, to fixing racecars and creating tools in space. There is no denying that 3D printing is

gaining momentum as it's hit the mainstream and its popularity will only continue to increase.

The only thing that's holding it back is us. With the potential to manufacture virtually anything,

the biggest problem facing 3D Printers, is the limits of the human imagination.

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Works Cited

American Transplant Foundation. "Facts and Myths". American Transplant Foundation.

American Transplant Foundation. 2015. Web. 24 Mar. 2015.

Chilson, Luke. "The Difference Between ABS and PLA for 3D Printing". Photo Paradigm.Photo

Paradigm. 27 Jan, 2013. Web. 20 April, 2015.

D' Aveni, Richard A. . "3D Printing Will Change The World". Harvard Business Review.

Harvard Buisness Review. Mar. 2013. Web. 26 Mar. 2015.

Ebay, "How to Get Started With a 3D Printer". Ebay, 24 Mar. 2015, Web. JPEG File.

Escobedo Jr., Victor M."3D Printing in Zero-G" NASA, NASA, 27 January 2015, Web, 24 Mar.

2015.

Greenburg, Andy. "State Department Demands Takedown Of 3D-Printable Gun Files For

Possible Export Control Violations", Forbes. Forbes, 09 May 2013. Web. 27 Mar. 2015.

Grunewald, Scott J. "Nissan Motorsports and Evok3D Beat the Heat with 3D Printing". 3D

Printing Industry . 3D Printing Industry. 13 Oct., 2014, Web. 24 Mar. 2015.

Krassenstien, Brian."3D Printing: Eployment Boom or Employment Swoon?" . 3DPrint.

3DPrint. 18 May 2014. Web. 26 Mar. 2015.

Lipson, Hod, and Melba Kurma. Fabricated: The New World or 3D Printing. Indianapolis, IN.

John Wiley & Sons Inc. 2013. Print.

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Markus, Frank. "Previewing 3D-Printed Cars at the 2015 Detroit Auto Show." Motor Trend

Magazine. The Enthusiast Network., 16 Jan. 2015. Web. 26 Mar. 2015.

McFarland, Matt."5 amazing ways 3-D-Printed food will change the way we eat " . The

Washington Post. The Washington Post. 28 Jan., Web, 24 Mar., 2015.

Stott, Rory. "Chinese Company Constructs the World's Tallest 3D Printed Building". Arch Daily.

Arch daily. 26 Jan. 2015, Web. 23 Mar. 2015.

Stott, Rory. "Chinese Company Showcases Ten 3D-Printed Houses". Arch Daily. Arch Daily. 2

Sep. 2014, Web, 23 Mar. 2015.

Ventola, C. Lee. "Medical Applications for 3D Printing: Current and Projected Uses". NCBI.

National Center for Biotechnical Information. Oct. 2014. Web. 24 Mar. 2015.

Wilson, Cody."3D Printed Guns", Vice, Youtube. 20 March 2015. Web.. 25 Mar. 2013.