Additive Manufacturing
Additive manufacturing adds material to create an object. It uses data from a computer-aided-design (CAD) software to direct hardware to deposit material, layer upon layer, in precise geometric shapes
Additive Manufacturing 1.0
Starting in the early 1980s and development of the first “three-dimensional printing” technologies — SLA and FDM (FFF) — and the entrance of “rapid prototyping” into more vocabularies. Rapid prototyping is tightly interwoven into this part of the history of the technology that many long-time industry participants still refer to “RP” instead of “3D printing” (much less “additive manufacturing”).
Until 2016, additive manufacturing using FDM & SLS remained the primary form of the 3D printer (less of additive manufacturing) and have been mainly used for rapid prototyping and lower throughput applications. This complete era of FDM/SLS based 3D printing can be referred to as Additive Manufacturing 1.0.
Growth and inflection
The additive manufacturing industry grew at a 20% annual compound rate between 2006 and 2016 before accelerating to 25% compound annual growth over the last three years - a rate that is expected to continue over the next decade as the market surges from $12 billion in 2019 to an estimated $146 billion in 2030.
Additive Manufacturing 2.0
In 2020, the market has reached an inflection point, shifting the applications from simple design prototyping and tooling to mass production of final components. This shift is enabled by the emergence of what is referred to as "Additive Manufacturing 2.0" - a wave of next-generation additive manufacturing technologies that unlock throughput, repeatability, and competitive part costs.
The key additive manufacturing technologies that are enabling the shift are
Desktop metal printers (Desktop metal, Markforged metal x)
Continuous fiber placement/printing (Addcomposites, 9Tlabs, CEAD, AREVO, Continuous composites)
These solutions are key innovations across hardware, materials, and software and pull additive manufacturing into direct competition with conventional processes used to manufacture $12 trillion in goods annually.