3D Printing: 100x Faster Than Ever and Heading for MarsJan16

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3D Printing: 100x Faster Than Ever and Heading for Mars

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3D Printing: 100x Faster Than Ever and Heading for Mars → 

Scientists have taken another step toward mass adoption of 3D printing across manufacturing supply chains of all scales and sizes. A brand-new process promises to make the printing process 100 times faster than it currently is, while also increasing durability and precision. Along with manufacturing, industries like aerospace and healthcare continue to be disrupted by 3D printing as well.

The most familiar form of 3D printing (also known as additive manufacturing), which is sort of like building 3D objects with a series of 1D lines, hasn’t been able to fill the gap on typical production timescales of a week or two. Using this increasingly obsolete method is not cost efficient for production jobs that aim to create identical items fewer than 10,000  because manufacturers could make the objects without the need for a mould costing upwards of $10,000. However, a new approach, pioneered by researchers at the University of Michigan, could make 3D printing 100 times faster and allow small-scale manufacturers quicker turnaround after a small batch of identical items has been produced.

The original method, which lifts complex shapes from a vat of liquid resin, solidifies the material using two lights to control where the resin hardens—and where it stays fluid. This enables the team to solidify the resin in more sophisticated patterns.  For instance, researchers can make a 3D bas-relief in a single shot rather than in a series of 1D lines or 2D cross-sections. By creating a relatively large region where no solidification occurs, thicker resins—potentially with strengthening powder additives—can produce more durable objects. The method also bests the structural integrity of filament 3D printing, as those objects have weak points at the interfaces between layers.

Along with the speed at which mass-produced products can be manufactured, the increased durability and precision in this new method of production can also play a huge role in 3D printings applications in several different fields. Hospitals, for instance, have recently begun to 3D print customized implants for recipients of orthopedic surgery. In the past, “one size fits all” type implants often caused complications that required patients to have revision surgeries after their original operations. These patients could suffer a great deal of pain and discomfort because their implants didn’t precisely fit their anatomy. Implants could be cut and shaped to better fit the patients, but this took valuable time during the operation and didn’t always result in a perfect fit. More and more patients are becoming the recipients of 3D printed jaws, ribs, spinal implants and more, leading to faster and more successful surgeries and less need for future revisions.

One of the more cutting-edge implants that scientists are now developing are spinal cord scaffolds. The 3D printed spinal implants, which are filled with neural stem cells before implantation, have the potential to improve nerve growth across spinal cord injuries thus restoring lost nerve connections and functions. In rat testing, the 3D printed spinal scaffolds showcased their ability to support tissue regrowth, stem cell survival and the expansion of neural stem cell axons—the threadlike extensions on nerve cells that connect to other cells—in the host’s damaged spinal cord. If the same could be done for humans, customizable models for spine shape and size, as well as type and severity of injury made possible by 3D printing the structure, would be a revolution in modern neurosurgery.

In the same way, specialized 3D-orinted auto components could be integrated into cars and trucks while also decreasing the costly inventories automakers and their dealerships have to hold on to. The advance of 3D printing solutions has become more imperative in this pursuit as of late due to dwindling storage space driving up costs to manufacturers. In digital inventory solutions like 3D printing, the warehouse itself is shelved in favor of an on-demand production facility located near the source of need. Digital files sent securely from the manufacturer ensure OEM-accurate designs, including in facilities across the world from the original supplier. 3D printing these files on-site on a reliable system with proven repeatability in quality, and post-processing the parts to ensure accurate geometries and surface finish, lessens the need for global shipping. The availability of industrial real estate fell to its lowest level since 2000 with only 7% of space available, according to a report from CBRE. Demand for warehouse space was 6.2 million square feet greater than supply in the fourth quarter of 2018.

3D printing could theoretically lead to an age of minimal to zero storage, a powerful cost-cutting initiative, but for some industries, a door to new worlds – literally. Relativity Space is currently developing a rocket made entirely through additive manufacturing in an effort to begin preparation for the colonization of Mars. The eventual goal is to produce a 3D printed rocket that could be viably reproduced entirely on Martian soil.

Using direct metal laser sintering (DMLS), a different process from the one being developed by the researchers at the University of Michigan, the printer spreads metal powder across a bed and a laser melts the powder into a pattern. Then the process is repeated as another layer of powder is deposited. DMLS is lately becoming a fairly popular additive manufacturing method, with Boeing and Airbus either looking into DMLS for manufacturing parts or using it in planes already. Relativity has designed their AEON 1 engine to be entirely 3D printed, reducing the thousands of parts that would go into a rocket engine down to just three. The entire engine is designed to be 3D printed, and there really is no other way to make this engine. Their complete mechanism, called “The Stargate”, includes robotic arms that fully automate the construction of complete rockets, perhaps one day, on the surface of alien planets. Last year, MRP highlighted other specific applications for 3D printing in space travel.

While commercial implementation of these innovations is a few years off, they show the full potential of 3D printing in what promises to be the next generation of manufacturing. Additionally, prepared investors who understand the breadth of roles 3D printing will fill should have an edge in taking advantage of this disruptive technology. Investors can gain exposure to 3D printing as well as other aerospace technologies via The 3D Printing ETF (PRNT).

We’ve also summarized the following articles related to this topic in the Manufacturing & Logistics section of today’s report.

3DP

• 3D Printing an Entire Rocket
• 3D printed implant shows promise for treating spinal cord injuries
• CES 2019: Sweet! Chocolate 3D Printing Moving Closer to the Masses
• 3D Printing Facility for Implants to be Established at Hospital for Special Surgery

Inventories

• Available warehouse space at lowest level since 2000

3D Printing (PRNT) vs S&P 500 (SPY)

Economics & Trade

ASEAN

These countries could be the surprise winners of the US-China trade war

After 20 years of the ubiquitous “Made in China” on all sorts of products, the country’s reputation as the world’s factory may be slowing. And investors are taking notice.

Rising labor and land costs, alongside greater environmental scrutiny, are making Chinese manufacturing less competitive compared with Asian rivals, and the trade war isn’t helping. China’s global manufacturing exports have been in decline since 2016 and intense competition from around the continent has seen foreign direct investment flow in different directions.

Obvious rivals like Japan, Taiwan and South Korea have all increased in attractiveness in recent years to CFOs, according to UBS. However, it is south Asia’s growing production hubs of the Philippines, India, and Vietnam where the real investment shift is occurring.

After reaching a record high of 8.7% in 2015, China’s share in global FDI stock dropped by almost one full percentage point in 2016 and 2017, while the country’s export growth figures dropped significantly in December. Similarly, Chinese exports to the US have dropped off as a result of the trade war leading investors to look elsewhere. BI

Finance

Banks

US banks wake up to an easy money hangover

Each bad market is bad in its own way. The characteristic feature of the rout that ended 2018 was the cruelty it visited on US bank stocks. This is striking, as the US economy is steady, the big US financial institutions are well capitalised and, for the most part, nicely profitable. Shares in US banks were down over 18 per cent in the fourth quarter, far worse than the wider market.

Bank shares have bounced back this year. Three big banks — Citigroup, JPMorgan and Wells Fargo —have reported fourth-quarter earnings so far this week, and other than rocky results in capital markets businesses, performance has been fine. But investors remain jumpy. Citi and Goldman Sachs still trade below the value of the tangible equity on their balance sheets.

What can the bank rout be telling us, then? That the process of normalising crisis-era monetary policy will be neither simple nor painless. As the Fed raises rates and quantitative easing has shifted into reverse, short-term credit costs are rising. Long-term loan rates have not risen as much, resulting in tighter profit margins for lenders. But the increases have been enough to raise the costs of auto and home loans, which has made those two sectors perhaps the weakest in the otherwise healthy US economy, while damping loan growth for banks. FT

Services

Plant-Based

Oat Milk Buzz Triggers a Factory Expansion and New Brands From Big Food

Supplies of oat milk, a coffee-shop favorite, are expanding after the popularity of the plant-based beverage last year left baristas struggling to meet demand.

Oatly Inc., based in Malmo, Sweden, is set to open a factory in Millville, New Jersey, in late March or early April to boost production by as much as 10 times. The closely held company had to turn down orders from some grocery stores and coffee shops amid limited supplies.

Other companies are jumping on the oat milk bandwagon amid signs that consumers are switching from almond milk in their coffee. California’s Califia Farms said last week that it will offer a line of oat milks with a version for coffee shops to be released in February and an unsweetened, at-home product in April. Quaker Oats, owned by PepsiCo, is starting to sell an oat beverage, and so is Danone’s Silk.

Oat production is sufficient to meet the beverage buzz, Mike Messersmith, general manager of Oatly’s U.S. operations in New York, said in a telephone interview. The company buys oats from Canada and the western U.S. and may purchase more from Midwestern farms in the future. Oats, a so-called cover crop, are grown in rotation with corn and soybeans and can help to prevent soil erosion and add nutrients. B

Robotics & Automation

Badger will deploy robots to nearly 500 Giant, Martin’s, and Stop and Shop stores in the U.S.

Fleets of robots will head to grocery store aisles later this year, thanks to a partnership between Kentucky-based Badger Technologies and Retail Business Services (RBS), the division of Ahold Delhaize that provides services to Food Lion, Hannaford, and other brick-and-mortar brands. The two today announced that Badger’s roving Marty bots, which identify potential safety hazards and perform other labor-saving tasks, will come to nearly 500 Giant, Martin’s, and Stop and Stop stores, following successful pilots.

The deployment — which Badger and RBS claim is one of the largest of its kind — is currently underway and will continue through the early part of 2019. Meanwhile, tests with additional Ahold Delhaize brands are ongoing in select stores.

“We are excited to be part of this industry-leading rollout of fully autonomous robots that collect safety data while traversing retail stores,” said Frederic McCoy, senior vice president of Badger parent Jabil. “Real-time hazard alerts empower stores to resolve incidents like spills, as well as improve operations.” VB

Cannabis

Canopy Growth to Build First U.S. Hemp Plant in New York State

Canopy Growth Corp. will spend as much as $150 million to build its first production facility in the U.S. after the Canadian cannabis company was granted a hemp license by New York state.

The U.S. farm bill legalized hemp and hemp-derived cannabidiol last month, creating a rush among Canadian pot firms that were previously unable to enter the U.S. market. Canopy said Monday it’s been granted a license by New York to process and produce hemp and plans to establish a hemp industrial park in the state focused on extraction and product manufacturing.

The company intends to invest between $100 million and $150 million in its New York operations, calling it “another example of the strategic advantage” resulting from Constellation Brands Inc.’s recent $4 billion investment in the company. Canopy is looking at several sites in the Southern Tier region of New York and plans to announce the location within 100 days, it said. The company will source hemp exclusively from U.S. farmers.

Canopy shares jumped more than 8 percent to a two-month high, reversing an earlier decline after the announcement. B

Video Games

U.S. and Canada grew total number of mobile gamers in 2018 by 5%

The U.S. and Canada saw a growth in mobile gaming in 2018. This is according to a new report done in collaboration with industry-tracking firm The NPD Group and mobile research firm Sensor Tower. Both countries have a combined 283.1 million mobile users, and 210.9 million of them play games. That marks a 5 percent increase over 2017.

The report notes that children are more likely to play mobile games on tablets, with 83 percent using those devices (compared to 54 percent of teens and adults). Teens and adults are more likely to play on smartphones, with 92 percent of that demographic gaming that way (compared to 63 percent of children). Smartphone gamers usually play about once a day on their devices. Tablet gamers play less frequently, typically using game apps a few times a week. VB

Video Games

Nvidia says streaming could never replace a gaming PC

Nvidia’s chief executive officer, Jensen Huang, has been in a chatty mood of late thanks to CES, recently firing flak at rival AMD’s freshly unveiled GPU, and now he’s been talking about the GeForce Now streaming service, and how it can never fully replace a dedicated gaming PC. And of course he’s right: streaming can never be quite as good as a local experience – playing the game right there on your PC – because there will always be a little lag introduced.

Huang observed: “The reason for that is because there’s one problem we haven’t figured out how to solve, and that’s the speed of light. When you’re playing esports, you need the response in a few milliseconds, not a few hundred milliseconds. It’s a fundamental problem. It’s just the laws of physics.”

So while GeForce Now is currently aiming to be able to stream games to an average (non-gaming) laptop allowing players to benefit from frame rates of 60 fps (or better, depending on the exact game) in Full HD resolution with a lag of something like 16ms – as we saw recently – that won’t be enough for professionals. TechRadar

Manufacturing & Logistics

3DP

3D Printing an Entire Rocket

There is a lot of work that goes into manufacturing a rocket. There are jigs that could cost millions of dollars, there are tanks that have to be pressure tested, and there is a vast amount of labor involved for what is essentially a very carefully controlled explosion.

This is changing with Relativity Space’s first rocket, the Terran 1. This is a 100-foot-tall, 7-foot diameter rocket that will launch 1250 kg to Low Earth Orbit. It uses Oxygen and Methane — the same fuel that SpaceX plans to use to return from the surface of Mars — and is almost entirely 3D printed. In fact, Relativity aims to build a rocket from raw materials and have it fly in two months.

If you’re printing a rocket engine, you need a 3D printer, and for this Relativity is using Direct Metal Laser Sintering, where metal powder is spread across a bed, a laser melts the powder into a pattern, and another layer of powder is deposited. While this sounds futuristic, it’s becoming a fairly standard industrial process, with Boeing and Airbus either looking into DMLS for manufacturing parts or using it in planes already. And Relativity is talking about 3D printing an entire rocket, not just an engine. Hackaday

3DP

3D printed implant shows promise for treating spinal cord injuries

In a big step forward for medical 3D printing, researchers from the University of California San Diego School of Medicine and the Institute of Engineering in Medicine have 3D printed spinal cord scaffolds and successfully implanted them into the spines of rats to treat spinal injuries.

The 3D printed spinal implants, which are filled with neural stem cells before implantation, have the potential to improve nerve growth across spinal cord injuries thus restoring lost nerve connections and functions. In the rat testing, the 3D printed spinal scaffolds showcased their ability to support tissue regrowth, stem cell survival and the expansion of neural stem cell axons—the threadlike extensions on nerve cells that connect to other cells—in the host’s damaged spinal cord.

Though we may not see the research materialize for human spinal treatment for some time, the achievement still marks an exciting step ahead for both medical AM and spinal injury treatment.3DPMN

3DP

CES 2019: Sweet! Chocolate 3D Printing Moving Closer to the Masses

Hailing from the Ukraine, Flasty makes the Chocola3D printer. It looks like a typical 3D printer, and extrudes chocolate into all kinds of fun shapes and patterns. At $1,800, the device isn’t cheap, but company reps told me they’ve already sold of number of them to restaurants across Europe.

JER Education has its own countertop food 3D printer that’s aimed more directly at the consumer market. It has an LCD screen to display parameters like temperature and speed, and lets you print pre-programmed shapes, doodles, or even uploaded pictures via the accompanying app. In addition to chocolate, the JER printer can print out cheese, jam, mashed potatoes and more. And If you’re looking for a little more portability in your chocolate printing, then perhaps the JER chocolate 3D printing pen is for you. Load it with choclate chips and scrawl your own chocolate delight. Spoon

3DP

3D Printing Facility for Implants to be Established at Hospital for Special Surgery

3D printed implants can be matched perfectly to an individual patient’s anatomy, and can be digitally shaped well before the operation ever takes place, saving time and allowing for much quicker, more efficient surgeries. More and more patients are becoming the recipients of 3D printed jaws, ribs, spinal implants and more, leading to faster and more successful surgeries and less need for future revisions.

These implants are the result of many parties working together, including surgeons, 3D modeling experts, and 3D printing service bureaus that actually print the implants themselves. But the process can be further streamlined by having a 3D printing facility right in a hospital.

Medical device company LimaCorporate and Hospital for Special Surgery, the top-ranked orthopedic hospital in the United States, are teaming up to establish the first 3D printing facility for complex custom implants in a hospital setting.

The new facility will be operated by Lima on the HSS campus in New York City’s Upper East Side. It will benefit from Lima’s advanced technology as well as HSS’ expertise in clinical care and biomedical engineering. In addition to directly helping individual patients at HSS, the collaboration is expected to facilitate research and innovation resulting in new products and solutions for patients across the United States. 3DPrint

Inventories

Available warehouse space at lowest level since 2000

The availability of industrial real estate fell to its lowest level since 2000 with only 7% of space available, according to a report from CBRE.

Demand for warehouse space was 6.2 million square feet greater than supply in the fourth quarter of 2018. This is down from a demand-supply gap of 9.3 million square feet in the third quarter. In 2018, the demand for warehouse space exceeded the supply by a yearly total of 29 million square feet. The fourth quarter of 2018 marked the 34th consecutive quarter of declining industrial real estate availability.

This lack of space is being driven by the boom in e-commerce and a generally strong U.S. economy, according to Richard Barkham, CBRE Global Chief Economist. “While factors such as higher interest rates and trade-protection worries are headwinds, the U.S. industrial real estate market will continue to draw momentum from the healthy U.S. labor-market, brisk import activity aided by the strong dollar and robust consumer confidence,” Barkham said in a statement.

But the struggle doesn’t end with finding available warehouse space. Companies are in need of space that can handle the needs of a large-scale e-commerce model. However, only 11% of warehouse space was built in the last decade, and the remaining space might not be up to snuff for modern day demands. SCDive