3D printing is additive manufacturing. In this process, the 3-dimensional objects are produced by a computer file, where parts are built by adding material layer by layer.
Today the 3D printing process is embraced by a variety of industries as it gives more advantages than subtractive manufacturing and injection modeling.
Benefits of 3D printing
1. Faster Production
3D printing produces things faster than any other subtractive manufacturing and injection modeling. Before 3D printing technology, it would take days or weeks to manufacture a prototype from its start to end. With 3D printing techniques, manufacturing would take up a few days (and sometimes even less) from its manufacturing to testing its part.
2. Better Quality
The parts produced through the traditional method are not good at quality, sometimes the designs are also not good. As in the traditional methods, all things like its designing and manufacturing are done together, so the quality is not assured.
But 3D printing allows you to develop the parts step by step, which results in good quality of parts and good design.
3. Cost-Effective
In the traditional methods, the laborers are involved to produce a prototype. So it’s a labor-intensive process and one has to pay these laborers which increases the cost for the owners. And the machinery like CNC machining and injection molding are also very expensive and the experienced workers are required to run them.
In 3D printing, the labor can be the one who is printing the part. So there is no cost of the labor to be borne. The machines involved in 3D printing are less in price.
4. Less Wastage
3D printing is additive manufacturing, it produces things layer by layer. So there will be less wastage of the materials, unlike subtractive manufacturing where some parts of the material are detached for carving a prototype.
5. Consistency
As in traditional manufacturing, there is an issue of quality. There is a possibility that some parts in the batch are defective or inconsistent parts as compared to others.
In 3D printing, the parts can be monitored while manufacturing, due to which the errors can be caught in real-time. These errors can be reduced so that the consistent quality of parts is produced.
6. Risk Reduction
3D printing technology allows the product designers to verify the prototype before starting out any manufacturing investment that can be tragic sometimes.
