Between big-bill acquisitions, surging stock prices, and major interest from investors, this was a year of financial success for the industry. Newbies entered the market, big companies got bigger, and some of the word’s biggest brands finally got interested.
So you might say this was a pretty successful year for 3D printing — not just as a technology but also as a bona fide, near-mainstream industry. Here are a few of the bigger financial highlights.
A jet engine bracket designed by M Arie Kurniawan, an engineer from Salatiga in Central Java, Indonesia, came in first place in a global 3D printing challenge held by GE and the open engineering community GrabCAD. Kurniawan will receive $7,000 in prize money. GE and GrabCAD also selected seven other design winners who will divide the balance of the $20,000 prize pool.
3D printing is reshaping some of the foundations of today’s society and economy. A report by Netopia shows the opportunities are monumental, but so are the legal and regulatory challenges on product safety, consumer protection or even international trade tariffs and value added taxes, writes Per Strömbäck.
IK4-LORTEK organiza una jornada divulgativa sobre Fabricación Aditiva de Componentes Metálicos que se desarrollará el día 27 de noviembre en la sede social de IK4-LORTEK, en Ordizia.
La tecnología de Fabricación Aditiva posibilita, además de otras capacidades, desarrollar productos que hasta el momento no eran posibles fabricar mediante las tecnologías de fabricación tradicionales, vislumbrando una nueva revolución industrial en un futuro cada vez más cercano.
There’s an inescapable aura of science fiction surrounding 3-D printing. If we can already print medical implants and jet parts, surely household replicators can’t be far behind. The rapid price drop in hobbyist printers in recent years would seem to confirm this trajectory, and last week HP added momentum to what can seem an unstoppable trend by revealing plans to sell 3-D printers by mid-2014.
But HP’s 3-D machines are unlikely to sit alongside its existing printers in offices and homes. Speaking at an event in Beijing, HP’s CEO, Meg Whitman, hinted that the 3-D printing technology being developed at the company’s research labs would aim to enable custom manufacturing shops to print out products more quickly.
Sketchfab is aiming to do for 3D fabrication what Youtube did for video, enabling designers to publish, share and embed their files in a visual and interactive way on any website.
Today’s 3-D printers can generally only build things out of one type of material—usually a plastic or, in certain expensive industrial versions of the machines, a metal. They can’t build objects with electronic, optical, or any kind of functions that require the integration of multiple materials. But recent advances in the research lab—including a 3-D printed battery and a bionic ear—suggest that this might soon change.
Me voy a estrenar en el blog, quizas con un tema que seguro que varios de vosotros teneis trillado, pero creo que puede haber oportuninades aunque probablemente no sea capaz de visualizar los "peros", y ahí es donde el debate puede enriquecer el asunto.
Bien, como muchos sabreis de un tiempo a esta parte se viene hablando de la impresión en 3D o 3D printing, especialmente en las ultimas semanas tras saltar la noticia de que un tipo por los USA ha dieseñado y fabricado un arma mediante una de estas impresoras.
A new generation of engines being developed by the world’s largest jet engine maker, CFM (a partnership between GE and Snecma of France), will allow aircraft to use about 15 percent less fuel—enough to save about $1 million per year per airplane and significantly reduce carbon emissions.
