While additive manufacturing has undeniable artistic possibilities through the simultaneous creation of real life form and color, I believe that the engineering possibilities are truly stunning when you really think about what is possible.   Typically an artist or even a CATIA designer will consider the external shape, texture, color, and possibly even the motion envelope of a part, additive manufacturing goes a dimension further by allowing you to design not just the shape, but the contents of what is inside the shape.

Consider that the 3D printers have multiple print heads and can lay down multiple materials with widely varying properties.  One print head can be adding droplets of rigid plastic, while another lays down a rubber material.  This capability allows for the continuous variation of material within a single part.   Perhaps you can have a part that transition from a hard plastic structural region into a softer rubber region.   This may sound familiar - even organic, when you consider the structure of the human body and how muscle tissue transitions to tendon.   This is no accident of nature - it is a design with purpose to provide a more secure attachment between the muscles and bones.    This transitional attachment is unattainable in traditional manufacturing, yet we know it to be very effective.   With additive manufacturing, functional organic structure can be mimicked, and the lessons that nature teaches us about how to carry loads can be incorporated through additive manufacturing techniques.

Another aspect of additive manufacturing is that materials do not need to be evenly mixed, but can be tailored to build a full 3 dimensional composite.   Although I don't think the technology exists quite yet, I have no doubt that in very little time we will see additive manufacturing methods that can print using a mix of conductive and non-conductive materials.   What does this mean?   Consider radio or cell phone antennas integrated in the roof of your car, or the ability to eliminate wiring by printing the conductive pathways right into the structure.   If you can print conductive pathways, then you can also use them to allow a structure to monitor its own health.   Sound familiar?   We are right back to nature again by copying the nervous system.

We have now come to a state where our ability to manufacture has exceeded our ability to design.  Furthermore not only do you need the technology to create a part for manufacturing, but you also need a technology to measure what you made to prove that what you made is what you have specified.

Some of this advanced manufacturing capability can be enabled through the use of SIMULIA's Tosca product.   Tosca is a tool that works with a finite element analysis code, like Abaqus (but not exclusive to Abaqus), that can evaluate the response of a structure or assembly to a load and will sculpt its shape to determine the optimal configuration.   Tosca can look at stiffness, deflection, strain energies, fatigue life (through FE Safe), volume - and many other responses to sculpt the optimal shape to meet the criteria the user sets up.   (These criteria should flow directly from your systems model and eventually have traceability right up to your customer defined requirements – and single source of the truth, but that’s a whole new topic under RFLP and systems engineering…)

The manufactured shapes can be scanned in 3D using laser or MRI techniques to generate point clouds to measure the external and internal shape of the manufactured part.   CATIA can use this scan data to compare with the model definition to determine if the part meets the specification.

Parts with 3D varying materials will have to be measured in other ways - possibly by physically testing the function of the part and recording the data in SLM for comparison to model specification.

Additive manufacturing will only get faster, more accurate, and be able to handle a wider variety of materials.  It has come a long way form the early, brittle SLA parts to the point where flight ready parts are being created utilizing SLM and SLS techniques in high strength and specialty metal alloys.   This new technology is being driven hard by market forces and will be driven rapidly - it will be exciting to watch this industry.

New design techniques will be needed to fully exploit the dreams that additive manufacturing makes possible, but with the suite of tools from Dassault Systemes we are off to a great start to explore product, life, and nature.