3d Printing Research Paper
Assignment #3
Adopt or develop a methodology for TA and design a plan to conduct a TA of the selected technology
This assessment will look at 3D printing and its impacts. 3D printing has many capabilities but comes with, like many technologies, pros and cons. It allows one to create a wide variety of products from a number of materials. It can be used for product formation, allowing designers and engineers to test out ideas for dimensional products cheaply before committing to the process. 3D printing also allows doctors to create replicas of the human parts they are about to operate on, for training purposes, as well as make bone grafts for patients who have suffered injuries. It is thought that in the future human organs can be created, …show more content…
which could be a replacement idea for cloning. Other avenues for 3D printing include architectural mockups, forensic purposes and for artists, creating costly or difficult items.
This assessment looks into public concerns based around this technology.
The problems that come with the many capabilities that 3D printing offer are many; the changes to the manufacturing process, copyright issues, and printing of illegal items. These are problems that are both a local and global issue. Researching these impacts will take some time to fully understand.
Rapid prototyping is the process of making a 3D solid object or almost any shape from a digital CAD design. It involves the use standard inkjet printing to create parts layer-by-layer by depositing a liquid binder onto thin layers of powder. Print heads are moved over a bed of powder which it then prints the cross-sectional data sent from the software. This process is then repeated layer-by-layer until the item is completed. Printers can print full working models of items, including things like a fully functional clock with …show more content…
gears.
“Anything you can make from powders: ceramics, metals, plastics,” Cima says — or even a mix of different materials in the same printed object, using different liquids in the print heads, like the different colors of ink in an inkjet printer.” (Singh, 2011)
Rapid prototyping opens itself to almost endless applications; open-sourced scientific equipment, paleontological reconstructions, archaeological replications, recreating body parts for forensic pathology and many more endless possibilities. These endless possibilities have already greatly assisted manufacturing companies, engineers, architects and many more create relatively quick and cheap prototypes of their products for viewing to look for design flaws and other problems that may have developed with their designs because the 3D printers can print full working models of their products. Prototypes of surgical tools can be brought to the surgeons to have their feedback on how the tool feels and works in real time, without having to build the tool with a costly surgical steel first.
The ease of availability of 3D printing has created a few problems.
Hobbyist 3D printing has created copyright issues, from people a man selling iPod/iPhone docks created to look like an item from the TV show The Game of Thrones, the creation of star wars characters, or other game, movie or TV show memorabilia. Controlling these copyright issues will be far more difficult than that of the music and film industries. As long as someone is proficient at CAD, knows someone who is, and has access to a 3D printer then these items can be replicated. Another issue is that of safety from the creation of weapons, there was a guy that created and 3D-printed a working gun. There had been websites allowing users to have designs of their guns, although have since taken them down due to their knowledge of their designs having been used for 3D
printing.
Correcting the problem that the ease of 3D-printing products, is not a task that easily undertaken; the major issue being copyrighting. This is a topic that is still being thoroughly sought after for other industries. A technology needs to be developed into the printers themselves, possibly, which can sense a certain image, like the shape of a gun, and not allow it to be printed.
Works Cited
Eveleth, R. (2012, November 14). Our three-dimensional future: how 3D printing will shape the global economy. Retrieved February 2013, from Smart Planet: http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/report/our-three-dimensional-future-how-3d-printing-will-shape-the-global-economy/559
Evelth, R. (2012, October 2). It 's All Fun and Games Until Someone 3D-Prints a Gun. Retrieved February 2013, from Smithsonian.com: http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/smartnews/2012/10/its-all-fun-and-games-until-someone-3d-prints-a-gun/
Singh, U. (2011, September 17). Pushing the Boundaries: 3D Printing. Retrieved February 2013, from Indian Young Scientist Network: http://iysn.org/2011/09/17/pushing-the-boundaries-3-d-printing/
Z Corporation. (n.d.). ZCorp 3D Printing Technology. Retrieved 2013, from ZCORP: http://www.zcorp.com/documents/108_3D%20Printing%20White%20Paper%20FINAL.pdf
Adopt or develop a methodology for TA and design a plan to conduct a TA of the selected technology
This assessment will look at 3D printing and its impacts. 3D printing has many capabilities but comes with, like many technologies, pros and cons. It allows one to create a wide variety of products from a number of materials. It can be used for product formation, allowing designers and engineers to test out ideas for dimensional products cheaply before committing to the process. 3D printing also allows doctors to create replicas of the human parts they are about to operate on, for training purposes, as well as make bone grafts for patients who have suffered injuries. It is thought that in the future human organs can be created, …show more content…
which could be a replacement idea for cloning. Other avenues for 3D printing include architectural mockups, forensic purposes and for artists, creating costly or difficult items.
This assessment looks into public concerns based around this technology.
The problems that come with the many capabilities that 3D printing offer are many; the changes to the manufacturing process, copyright issues, and printing of illegal items. These are problems that are both a local and global issue. Researching these impacts will take some time to fully understand.
Rapid prototyping is the process of making a 3D solid object or almost any shape from a digital CAD design. It involves the use standard inkjet printing to create parts layer-by-layer by depositing a liquid binder onto thin layers of powder. Print heads are moved over a bed of powder which it then prints the cross-sectional data sent from the software. This process is then repeated layer-by-layer until the item is completed. Printers can print full working models of items, including things like a fully functional clock with …show more content…
gears.
“Anything you can make from powders: ceramics, metals, plastics,” Cima says — or even a mix of different materials in the same printed object, using different liquids in the print heads, like the different colors of ink in an inkjet printer.” (Singh, 2011)
Rapid prototyping opens itself to almost endless applications; open-sourced scientific equipment, paleontological reconstructions, archaeological replications, recreating body parts for forensic pathology and many more endless possibilities. These endless possibilities have already greatly assisted manufacturing companies, engineers, architects and many more create relatively quick and cheap prototypes of their products for viewing to look for design flaws and other problems that may have developed with their designs because the 3D printers can print full working models of their products. Prototypes of surgical tools can be brought to the surgeons to have their feedback on how the tool feels and works in real time, without having to build the tool with a costly surgical steel first.
The ease of availability of 3D printing has created a few problems.
Hobbyist 3D printing has created copyright issues, from people a man selling iPod/iPhone docks created to look like an item from the TV show The Game of Thrones, the creation of star wars characters, or other game, movie or TV show memorabilia. Controlling these copyright issues will be far more difficult than that of the music and film industries. As long as someone is proficient at CAD, knows someone who is, and has access to a 3D printer then these items can be replicated. Another issue is that of safety from the creation of weapons, there was a guy that created and 3D-printed a working gun. There had been websites allowing users to have designs of their guns, although have since taken them down due to their knowledge of their designs having been used for 3D
printing.
Correcting the problem that the ease of 3D-printing products, is not a task that easily undertaken; the major issue being copyrighting. This is a topic that is still being thoroughly sought after for other industries. A technology needs to be developed into the printers themselves, possibly, which can sense a certain image, like the shape of a gun, and not allow it to be printed.
Works Cited
Eveleth, R. (2012, November 14). Our three-dimensional future: how 3D printing will shape the global economy. Retrieved February 2013, from Smart Planet: http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/report/our-three-dimensional-future-how-3d-printing-will-shape-the-global-economy/559
Evelth, R. (2012, October 2). It 's All Fun and Games Until Someone 3D-Prints a Gun. Retrieved February 2013, from Smithsonian.com: http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/smartnews/2012/10/its-all-fun-and-games-until-someone-3d-prints-a-gun/
Singh, U. (2011, September 17). Pushing the Boundaries: 3D Printing. Retrieved February 2013, from Indian Young Scientist Network: http://iysn.org/2011/09/17/pushing-the-boundaries-3-d-printing/
Z Corporation. (n.d.). ZCorp 3D Printing Technology. Retrieved 2013, from ZCORP: http://www.zcorp.com/documents/108_3D%20Printing%20White%20Paper%20FINAL.pdf