3D Printing has a BIG Problem
Additive Manufacturing is neither reliable nor scalable enough for production.
The Problem:
Today, manufacturing enterprises cannot effectively adopt, optimize, nor monotize 3D printing.
This is because:
For us, this means AM:
- Is Mystery Technology - The lack of comparable evaluations across different complete AM ecosystems confuse adopters.
- Has Steep Learning Curve - High complexity and cost of adopting and scaling AM systems stop AM at prototyping.
- Has Lack of Trust in Final Parts - Unpredictable machines, materials, and processes make final parts quality highly variable.
Nobody has fixed this yet because:
- 3D printed parts are hard to measure and validate.
- AM produces massive amounts of data very quickly.
- AM control parameters are complicated and highly coupled.
- Most OEM’s are very proprietary.
- This is all very new.
Why does this matter?
It matters because:
- Right now, humans are incapable of processing and making informed decision from that much data.
- It is cost prohibitive to guarantee parts, especially at scale.
- The kicker - Even if we knew how to guarantee a given am process or part as a human, AM softwares do not have the controls nor tools necessary to implement our decisions.