Smart Manufacturing

CHAPTER 123D Printing and Additive Manufacturing

Bahareh Tavousi Tabatabaei, Rui Huang, and Jae-Won Choi

Introduction

Additive manufacturing (AM) is a technology used to create an object from a computer-aided design (CAD) model by adding materials in a layer-by-layer manner (Ngo et al. 2018). This chapter aims to provide a brief introduction to the basic concepts of additive manufacturing, the history and current state of this technology, and a description of the methods, materials, and application of this technology in different industries.

The first commercialized system for additive manufacturing, known as the stereolithography apparatus (SLA), was developed by Charles Hull in 1986 (Ngo et al. 2018). This system incorporated an ultraviolet (UV) laser to solidify a photo-curable liquid polymer (Bose and Bandyopadhyay 2019). Remarkable developments such as fused deposition modeling (FDM), inkjet printing, and other techniques have been made since the advent of SLA (S. H. Huang et al. 2013).

Rapid prototyping (RP) and other terms had been used to represent the various AM processes until the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) Technical Committee agreed on the new term additive manufacturing (ASTM International 2012). RP was initially regarded as a process to fabricate a model quickly for the purpose of visualizing a design or creating a representative example of a final product, and this process has helped engineers to create and analyze the designs they have ...