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3D printing is a versatile method of manufacturing that can be implemented across a wide range of industries in many different applications. At Formnext 2023, the TCT content team asked exhibitors and attendees for their favourite 3D printing application.
Andrew Sink – Senior Applications Engineer, Carbon
“My favourite 3D printing application, I’m a little bit biased because I’ve been working on one for a while now, but 3D printed bicycle saddles I think are just incredible. The ability to take a pressure map and understand where pressure is the highest on a saddle and then create a structure that disperses that pressure more evenly, is really difficult to do with traditional materials, but with 3D printing its easy.”
Monica Smith – Product Line Manager Metal Systems, EOS
“My favourite 3D printing application, I am an aerospace girl, so aerospace applications are where my heart is.”
Alain Dupont – Chief Commercial Officer, GE Additive
“An application done with our printers at GE Additive obviously.”
Kartik Rao – Strategic Marketing Director, Additive Industries
“Probably tooling nozzles.”
Norbert Gall – Head of Marketing and PR, Lithoz
“My personal favourite I would say is the bioabsorbable ceramics that we build that we can provide to our customers, which means that once it is implanted in the human body, it is accepted as a natural bone because it’s just bone-like. The human tissue is allowed to grow through it, and after a certain time that is of course also depending on the material, it just dissolves and disappears, which means bioresorption in technical terms. I think this is just a completely magic thing that is actually very hard to imagine, but it exists.”
Cora Leibig – Founder and CEO, Chromatic 3D Materials
“Today I have to say it’s the dress.”
David Moodie – Founder and CEO, Foundry Lab
“Apart from ours, it’s got to be medical, it’s got to be what that actually enables.”
Frederic Larouche, General Manager, GE Additive
“Biomedical implants. For me it’s a new products, safer, better biocompatibility, and it is cost competitive.”
Francesco Pantaleone – Executive Vice President of Business Development, Roboze
“When we have so much resistance into adoption, those are the applications that really spark my passion and interest. We had literally a case where in this environment, it was a chemical environment in an old plant, plastic parts were never used before, and literally we had shift managers throwing them on the ground and trying to smash them to show the plant manager that this will never work, that this is going to break. Actually, that same application enables this company to save millions of dollars, thanks to the metal replacement in weight reduction and corrosion resistance. So this is one that is very close to my heart, simply because the levels of resistance that we found were so high, but again being able to explain how that application would have turned their business around, and this case we’re talking about manufacturing. They went producing this product with our solution form 400 tons a day to 700 tons a day, so exponentially more value, and this gave me a great deal of satisfaction.”
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Exhibit at the UK's definitive and most influential 3D printing and additive manufacturing event, TCT 3Sixty.
