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In the industrial/commercial world, 3D printing – also known as Additive Manufacturing (AM) – offers a number of significant benefits versus traditional manufacturing processes:

• Creating complex geometric forms
• Elimination of almost all fixturing, operation and setup time
• Reduced waste as objects are built, rather than cut away from the material
• Producing “production runs of one” efficiently, without tooling

Now, let’s look at two of the main industrial/commercial applications enabled with 3D Printing: 

Prototyping
Prototyping was the first application in this market. Today, 3D printing is becoming mainstream in product development, as a tool to prototype new designs, with companies incorporating 3D printers in-house or getting prototype parts through service bureaus. The use of 3D printing shortens design cycles and enables more disruptive and effective designs.
3D printing for prototypes continues to grow with main drivers being: 

• Pressure on companies to reduce design cycle lead-times in order to compete
• More innovative designs

Despite there being a lot of use cases of final parts production using AM processes, today it still represents a small portion of the market, but a significant growth opportunity, with the main growth drivers being: 

• A need to differentiate by offering valued, customized, unique products
• Taking advantage of more complex geometries – lighter weights, optimization and other variables
• A drive to find cost efficiencies, and ways to reduce waste and inventory
• Slow turning low volume, long-tail parts

In order to drive that growth in both of the above, the 3D printing industry needs to enable:

• Higher productivity printers that deliver a predictable output (i.e. closed loop quality control on single part runs)
• Integrated design-to-print workflow
• Lower materials cost and increased materials versatility

In light of these growth opportunities, HP started analyzing the 3D printing market some years ago – looking at existing technologies and working to understand what it would take to increase adoption of 3D printing. We came to the realization that technology disruption was needed to drive transformation. We also established that a collaborative approach with software and materials specialists will be key to advancing the state-of-the-art of the industry as a whole.

We then undertook a grass-roots organic investigation and looked at a variety of disruptive technologies before focusing on the feasibility of HP Multi Jet Fusion™ technology attaining breakthrough part quality at breakthrough speed and economics.
Once technology feasibility was proven we started development of the first products with the HP Multi Jet Fusion™ technology platform, announcing the technology in October 2014 in order to kick-off our Open Engagement partnering program for software and materials, and start an agile Hardware development cycle on our first 3D printing platforms.

We look forward to introducing the world to the limitless potential of 3D printing with our first platform powered by HP Multi Jet Fusion™ technology towards the end of 2016.

Let us know your thoughts and stay tuned to this blog for the latest developments!