How 3D Printing Could Drive the Factory of the Future
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Hi, danny y. alex. Have you ever heard of 3d printing？

Yeah, of course there is so much hype about that a few years ago.

right? Like, have you ever used a three d printer? really? Do you have anything made from three d printing?

I've never used one, but I do have like some boxes and stuff that were made with three printing.

And what do they look like?

They're plastic and there's lots of ridges on IT because they build everything in layers over and over and over again, hand like a lazzi or something.

right? So this idea of depositing a material in layers make sense for, like little things that we have at home, right? That hype around you, we're going to have one of these in every home hasn't really come to pass.

right? right? No star truck replicators.

not yet, but IT turns out there is a really useful place for this kind of technique, which is in manufacturing. So the technical term is additive manufacturing. okay? And some people are saying that additive manufacturing could actually transform the entire industry, like I could lay the foundation for what they are calling the factory of the future.

3， printing works differently than other methods for making stuff. So unlike casting or molding, which happens when a material is placed inside or around something else, a three d printer deposits layers of a material like plastic or meddle on top of each other. Today, though, hobbist do still use three d printers, machines like these have much wider applications. They are used to make parts for cars, medical implants like teeth, and even parts for commercial airplanes.

In our s to fifty aircraft, we have replaced a lot of conventional polymer parts that was additive manufacturing simply because it's cheaper.

That's hawk s shoulder. He oversees additive manufacturing research and technology at airbus. Airplanes are, of course, complicated and sophisticated pieces of technology. So the company can't three print everything, but you might have written in a plane that uses three d printed parts.

We have also metal parts in our ice for fifty, specifically in the doors. And when I say metal, this means titanium, actually. So it's a high strings, a metal. There's A A very good use case and mechanism that opening and closing basically the doors and this part we could make a thirty present lighter, so cheaper and manufacturing.

This technology has also become big money in the years since become popular with hobbist. The market for three d printing materials was about seventeen billion dollars in twenty twenty two, and it's expected to grow to nearly one hundred billion dollars by twenty thirty two, according to market research firm precedence research. Its biggest impact on the future may not be those starbucks style replicators in our homes like we were promised. Instead, IT may be changing how we make stuff, but the technology is still fairly new and engineers are still figuring out how best to use really printing and for what from .

the will state journal. This is the future of everything. I'm alex so salad .

and i'm danny Lewis. Today, we're looking at how additive manufacturing could change the way we make everything from airplanes to cars to houses and .

how this technology could make them more quickly and for less stay with us.

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I recently paid a visit to rock's university in new jersey, where I met with a gieve mohra. Mohra studies new ways to manufacture things, including with 3d printing。 And he's showing me this wild thing one of his graduate students has put together.

This is a exactly why access and A Z access. And this is mounted on a rumble, right.

the a literal roomba, but a muted one picture of black disk with a bunch of exposed circuit boards on top of IT, along with the school of bright blue plastic fiber that plastic feeds into the nozzle of a three d printer attached to the back of the robot vacuum. So IT leaves a trail behind IT as IT tunnels around on top of a metal table. Not everything went according to plan, though.

The room has started moving, but the printer wasn't working. Process might not start because the wifi is down right now. Evan mater ova is one of my hotz graduate students. That happens, but we can see that flight on top, and we're able to maneuver without any issues. A few minutes and one either net cable later, the rumbo was ready to print.

So right now the robot is finding out where IT is. IT is touching the base is going, where are mine? Then it's gonna start print. So you can see IT started pushing material out.

It's pretty as we watched the roomba drove on top of the square of bright blue plastic about two feet long. On each side. IT was about a stick as a couple of credit cards and was made from the same stuff coiled up on that school, attached to the robots. Back as the room was slowly moved onto the square, more of that plastic was laid down behind IT on top of the sheep, kind of like a slight trail left by a snail.

First land was printed ted by the models on the table, and the second land was printed IT climbed up and I printed a dot, right?

Mohra says the reason for the ruber is to make add manufacturing more adaptable. He says a mobile printer that isn't constrained by a box could allow future printers to build larger and more complex objects if you want .

to make them bigger and bigger, making the machine bigger and bigger, whether eventually, if you want to make something the size of the room, you have to buy something bitter than this room had hundreds and thousands of dollars.

right? In fact, size was a limitation that hawk shalts, in charge of additive manufacturing at airbus, that was something that could make this technology more useful for his company in the future.

The technology makes a lot of advancements. Machines are getting bigger and more productive. So additive manufacture becomes more and more rules, becomes one more to stand up technology, and it's more and more easy to implement IT.

This is something that lots of companies are experimenting with their industrial processes, the robbers being able to use a bunch of three d printers to make lots of small parts, whether their prototypes, mulls or tools for factory workers to use. One of those companies is ford, the maker of the mustang and the f one fifty.

When I plants here in north america, we have probably over seventy three d printings to help make economic aid Operators to hold parts in a Better way to get higher quality to use for spare parts, for equipment. And they can do IT very quickly and they can interactively prototype.

That's egerius Price. He's the executive director for global manufacturing engineering at the ford motor company. He says the automatic er has been using three printing to design and produce cars for decades.

If you go back through the value chain, every ford model that we make in north america, that car was either touched by a three d printed part, or a 3d printed part was used to develop the project， or a three d printed pot was used to make a tool to help make IT Price says .

three d printing or additive manufacturing, whatever you want to call IT, is becoming a larger part of the factory line. But there are some chAllenges this technology still needs to overcome.

One of the things that we are working on, obviously, is how do we scale that and get IT, more efficient, much higher production building? How do we get to three hundred and seventy five thousand parts coming out of the process? A very cost efficient way.

for the most part. Price has ford uses standard three printers for large projects. The company's engineers often make multiple parts and stick them together. Records professor of gieve motta says the rubber project is one way to solve the problems of speed, size and efficiency.

Bigger idea here will pull in the next five to six years is to be able to say, we have an army of these three, four, five of these working together to build small and small little sections. Small and small little sections are up to bigger parts, right? And we have all of them working together so that now you can build a heart that is bigger than each individual robot, or each individual and manufacturing machine.

If multiple printers mounted on roommates or something like them can work together on something larger than themselves, that could open the gates to larger and more intricate three d printing projects, turning each robot into what motto calls a tiny factory. And whether you're building a tool to make a car part or the part itself, motto says additive manufacturing has the potential to be a lot more precise.

Luzon is a good example of additive manufacturing ing. Actually, you add beef, you add cheese, you add to maino sauce and all of that, right? Very much same thing in active manufacturing. We can add a different materials and different layers at different locations. We can leave spaces out where we don't need them instead .

of carving a solid block of metal to make a mold for a tool, for example, a three printer or a team of robots could just make the tool itself, saving time, materials and money. On the flip side, relying on just one machine could mean big problems if something breaks.

One of the issues without the manufacturing is there's a lot of chances for IT to go wrong, right? You are adding material point by point. If you are adding fifty thousand point, then a good gambler knows how many chances you have of screwing that up, right? A lot bigger barts, bigger problems and potentially .

losing time and money that three printing was supposed to save in the first place to prevent a three d printed object from falling apart like a poorly madlib. Ana mohur a showed me another project. One of his graduate students is working on a device that acts like a self correcting in jet printer or.

There.

yes, there is that tiny is little. The IT was a really small error, but as we watched on a close up camera screen, a gap of fraction of an inch appeared between two lines of plastic.

We can. The properties of this part is garbage, right, which we don't want. So now it's corrected itself.

As we spoke, the gaps seized up. The freshly printed plastic was once again being laid directly next to the previous line. This was just a demonstration, but my holda says even a small error could permanently weaken a three printed object.

If you are putting pieces of lazzara on top of each other, you need the cheese to stick to everything on the bottom right. If you don't have IT, then when you would start to eat IT, it's like a bad sandwich just falls apart.

That same inject printer has other abilities to iraq that allows for up to fourteen different nozzles to be used at once, unlike conventional 3d printers， which only have one. Mohra showed me a few different objects the students had made with this device. Multicoloured objects made from a variety of plastic fill.

each of these colors correspond to a different excluders, to a different print or head. That is, one section blue, is one section bronze. All of them are printed at the same time.

just like a home printer has separate cartridge for different kinds of ink, making a 3d printer that can mix different materials the same way and inject printer mixes different colors could be a step towards having a single printer that can make complex parts out of multiple materials all in one go。

The key is to be able to do IT and enough scale for different applications with enough materials, with enough control. We need to be able to do this across the board. When ford can make an actively manufactured engine on mass, then additives would realize its true potential.

For now, though, Price, the ford engineer, said his company is mostly looking at the future of 3d printing in making small components and tools， not entire engines, but engine parts.

There's a limited amount of materials that we can print at this point, some more materials with broader properties because you the reason why we use a lot of different materials in what a motive in our production of our vehicles is because we need the specific property of that particular material based on what is function is right from interior part that you sit on to a suspension component part has to be a very light way and but also very robust.

Plus, he says, additive manufacturing just isn't faster for a company like ford.

If you take an f one fifty, we're making one of those every fifty eight seconds, right? So that's a lot of volume. Traditional manufacturing methods work Better for those kind of things.

And so to me, this is more about you picking the right tool for the job, right? Can't eat soup with a fork. And in the same way, we have to think about what are the right tools that get us the most efficient.

But some researchers are already trying their hand at some larger scale applications and making a factory of the future they think can solve these chAllenges. Alex has more on how that could work after the break.

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In orono main there's a house unlike any other i've ever seen. It's a fairly small one bedroom, about six hundred square feet, with a kitchen, living room and bathroom. It's got a front porch and lots of natural light.

All that is pretty Normal. But there are details that give away its uniqueness, like it's distinct curved walls and ceilings, and they're made of a woody material that i've never seen before. It's ridged and deposited in layers.

High school students, and they come in this cream and I say, oh my god, I can live in this. I want one.

How can I get one of these? That's a beat digger, the director of the advanced structures and composite center at the university of main. What's extra special about this home, he says, is that IT was three printed with wood fiber, and bioreactor are recyclable. Duggar eventually hopes to be able to print one of these houses in about forty eight hours, though printing this one took a lot longer. Once the pieces are done, they can be shipped and quickly put together.

So basically, when you get to the house is head a day assembling the house, or a day and you're done.

the immediate goal of structures like this is to address a housing shortage going on in the state. But that's not the only big thing being made at the composition center. They've produced a boat that actually floats modes for blades, for offshore windmills, even floor systems for high rise buildings.

Remember how we talked about large scale additive manufacturing? This is where some of that is actually happening. To print big stuff, of course, you need a really big printer.

The one at the university of maine is the biggest in the world. I got to see IT in action. Actually, I stood incited to give you a sense of just how big IT is. The printer is designed to print objects as long as a hundred feet, so about two school buses and end, and as wide as twenty two feet, which is a little more than the wife of two school buses next to each other. It's a little hard to hear dog here because we were standing inside the printer.

This is what call the positioning system.

So just, just something, a positions at all summer. And the the work course that does the job is the tool. We call that an end effect.

The university of main composite center is already using this three d printer to make things on the behalf of clients, which include architecture firms and the U. S. government.

What you're inside off is not a three primer, is a hybrid manufacturing self that has multiple manufacture processes because the printing is not the only way of problems. So by having multiple manufacture process is collaborating together, including three days, is the key to getting where we need to go.

The vision is what dagger calls the factory of the future. Say you have a factory that makes parts for an airplane instead of having one machine, that there's just one thing. The vision for the factory of the future is that each machine can do multiple things that's only possible with a lot of feedback and communication between various instruments working together.

So basi C2Close loo k, manufacturing process where you printing something you're sensing at the same time you're sending the information that computer and in the ice system that comes where I can see where we we going to fix this because it's a problem and you make me does that. And the more IT prints, the more and this matter gets degar says .

the university has raised eighty one point five million dollars to construct this factory of the future, and we'll be breaking ground later this year. And he says there's a lot they still don't know yet, like what kinds of materials they could use and what industries IT could make a difference for.

Were the first to do with that such a large scale and try to really understand the opportunities as well as the chAllenges to try to use this technology and trying to understand what really first in our future, because not everything can be present and nothing should be printed, but what can be printed, what should be printed and how to print them out. The chAllenges .

of trying for airbus hawk shot, who we met earlier as a change like that, could be a big deal for its manufacturing process and its bottom line.

So that could mean you don't have big depos anymore with pairs parts, for example, but you just produce on demand. Very flexible. And it's a big advantage of additive manufacturing ing to be resilient. Additive manufacturing as an industrial resilient technology, you would say, because it's very flexible, you can use the same machine for a lot of different parts. And so this is a big, big benefit.

Those shit says the company has plans to expand its use of three d printing in the future. It's still figuring out when and how to best use IT. That's especially true as the technology improves and the people designing the machines figure out how to do things like use new materials and reduce waste .

as additive manufacturing ing is actually still a complicated technology and an expensive technology. So we wouldn't use IT for something that is very simple, if you can do by sheep metal bending, simple l break. You don't want a princess, but apart. That is complex, that integrates a lot of different functions.

Could you see someday a plane made entirely of three d printing, just three d printed plane some day?

Yes, of course, I can imagine that in the near future, in the next five years, ten years, probably not. Airplanes are still very complex and have a lot of technologies to manufacturer. m.

The future of everything is a production of the wall street journal symphonie egan fruits is the editorial director of the future of everything. This episode was produced by me, Alice sola and me.

danny Lewis. Our fact checker is a partner name, Michael level, and just defending our our sound designers and wrote our the music Katherine museum is our supervising producer.

I shall muslim is our development producer. Scott salary and Christine sley are the deputy editors and philon a patterson is the head of news audio for the wall street journal.

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Amazon q business is the new generative A I assistant from A W S, because many tasks can make business slow, as if waiting through mud help.

Luckily.

there's a faster, easier, less messy choice. Amazon q can security understand your business data and use that knowledge to streamline task? Now you can summarize quarterly results or do complex analysis in no time.

Q, got this. Learn what amazon q business can do for you at A W S dot com. Slash, learn more.