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3D Printing (continued)
Quality
Quality is limited in two respects. One is the choice of print-
able materials. Although a wide range of materials (such as
thermoplastics and metals) can be 3D-printed, the majority of
materials are still not printable. The other limitation is process
control, which is still mostly open loop, making it difficult to
ensure consistent production. Materials sometimes are not fully
joined during the printing process, which leaves voids inside
the structure and leads to inferior properties (such as lesser
strength) compared to bulk material properties. Many efforts
are currently being devoted to improving the print quality,
such as expanding the range of printable materials with new
techniques, developing modeling tools for better process con-
trol (for example, 3DSim), and new techniques (such as sensors
and infrared camera) for feedback control.
Design tools
The design freedom unleashed by 3D printing is overwhelm-
ing, which renders existing design tools insufficient. For
example, because of the complexity, it is difficult to design lat-
tice structures with existing CAD software. In addition, current
CAD software usually lacks the capabilities to design material
composition. The design space has been significantly increased,
and new design theory and tools will be needed to take full
advantage of 3D printing capabilities.
Fig. 4: Illustration of the vision of autonomous digital additive manufacturing (ADAM), where thousands of autonomous
3D printing robots can work together to build different products autonomously.
