Accessories / jewelry
3D printers are great for making trinkets and tiny add-ons for our daily lives. Jewelery printing is perhaps the best example of this. This is another niche within 3D printing. Printers like the Solidscape S300 are ideal for creating the wax molds one uses to produce jewellery. Solidscape actually has a whole line of these sorts of machines, indicating that the market is there.
Medical
The outlook for medical use of 3D printing is evolving at an extremely rapid pace as specialists are beginning to utilize 3D printing in more advanced ways. Patients around the world are experiencing improved quality of care through 3D printed implants and prosthetics never before seen. Even 3D pens are helping out in orthopaedic surgery.
Bio-printing
As of the early two-thousands 3D printing technology has been studied by biotech firms and academia for possible use in tissue engineering applications where organs and body parts are built using inkjet techniques. Layers of living cells are deposited onto a gel medium and slowly built up to form three dimensional structures. We refer to this field of research with the term: bio-printing.
Dental
The dental industry is embracing 3D printed goods in a rapid pace. AM has allowed dentists to make bite splints, night guards, retainers, dentures and crowns. In fact, there’s a whole market for dental printers like the EnvisionTEC Vida. These printers allow dental professionals to craft appliances in the exact shape that clients need them in for a fraction of the usual cost.
Food
Additive manufacturing invaded the food industry a long time ago. Restaurants like Food Ink and Melisse use this as a unique selling point to attract customers from across the world.
3D Printing is allowing for odd kinds of food to come about. Shape-changing or transparent pasta’s could be available at a store near you any time soon. Even NASA are getting in on the act with pizza printed in space.
Fashion
3D printing has been on the periphery of the fashion world. Aspiring designers have long been trying to leverage its potential.
Designers are making tools that can shake up the production and retail system. Danit Peleg is a fashion designer with a keen eye for the future. While implementing 3D printing into fashion is nothing new, the consumer model she is using on her website is immensely clever. On the website, users can design their own jacket and have it printed, fitted and delivered in just a few clicks.
Looking around, one can see the growth of 3D printed fashion. Considered the pioneer of 3D printed haute couture, Iris van Herpen, prints dresses in collaboration with i.Materialize.
The Adidas Futurecraft 4D has a 3D printed sole. Adidas has made arrangements with Carbon to use their DLS 3D printing process. Major companies taking an interest in these possibilities is indicative of an inevitable wave of growth.
Types of 3D Printing Technologies and Processes
There are several ways to 3D print. All these technologies are additive, differing mainly in the way layers are build to create an object.
Some methods use melting or softening material to extrude layers. Others cure a photo-reactive resin with a UV laser (or another similar light source) layer by layer.
To be more precise: since 2010, the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) group “ASTM F42 – Additive Manufacturing”, developed a set of standards that classify the Additive Manufacturing processes into 7 categories according to Standard Terminology for Additive Manufacturing Technologies. These seven processes are:
