Until September of 2011, 3D printing machines could be grouped into two categories—those for prototyping and those that could handle limited production. Lately, new 3D printing manufacturers have entered this industry, introducing popular do-it-yourself maker/hobby style units. In addition, the established vendors have been introducing smaller desktop prototyping units. Keeping track of all of these new models is starting to take a lot of time.

There are many ways to organize 3D printing technology; a few will be covered here. (The editors at Make Parts Fast also have an organized version in the rapid prototyping selector tool available at www.makepartsfast.com)

One way of organizing 3D printers was recently introduced by Todd Grimm. With the addition of newer units, Grimm proposes four categories: Consumer, Personal, Professional, and Production.

The consumer category includes 3D printers that come in assembled or non-assembled kit form, are typically open-source, and limited in material and part build accuracy. The personal category includes printers for business uses. While they have some features similar to consumer units, they typically have a larger range of material and better build accuracy. The professional units are the ones engineers are most familiar with. As Grimm noted, this category includes all of the 3D printer technologies and most of the advanced features available in the industry. The production group consists of those units that can be used in automation applications, have a large capacity, and good operational monitoring for consistent part quality. In some cases, this group overlaps with the professional units.

But, you can also view this industry through demographics. Here you have the engineer, the consumer, the practitioner, and the artist. The recent commentary from each of these groups about 3D printing ranges from, “this is the best thing that ever happened to the world and it will eliminate manufacturing as we know it,” to “it’s just another day at the office.” It will be interesting to see how the 3D printer vendors work with these groups.

The applications for 3D printing, so far, are modeling, prototyping, tooling, and manufacturing.

Since the industry seems to be settling on the term 3D printing, rather than additive manufacturing, it’s important to remember that “printing” is only one of the technologies used by equipment in this industry. Thus, you can group these machines by the process they use to print parts, and this is important to understand in order to grasp the capability and price differences among these systems.

Processes include:

• Extrusion, which includes FDM/FFF, and jet printing.

• Jetting, which includes systems that use polyjet, multi-jet, or direct metal printing.

• Lamination, which is a process found in Mcorr machines that use paper as the build material.

• Melting, which includes electron beam melting, direct metal deposition, and laser consolidation.

• Photo-curing, which includes stereolithography, polyjet, multi-jet, Digital Light Processing (DLP), and film transfer imaging

• Sintering, which includes laser sintering, direct metal laser sintering, and selective laser melting.

3D printing appears to be breaking wide open, expanding its range and scope. It will be fun to watch what develops, and how that will change how we look at this technology. MPF

Leslie Langnau – Managing Editor

llangnau@wtwhmedia.com