*Originally published by Pennsylvania Business Central

In 2014, Joseph Sinclair was a senior in engineering at The Pennsylvania State University. He was interested in manufacturing and was trying to find a 3D printer on campus to make some parts he had designed for a course project. He couldn’t find any easily accessible 3D printers on campus nor in town, so he decided to purchase a 3D printer and learn how to operate it. After using the printer for a few months, he found he was very good at designing and engineering 3D prototypes, so he started making them for his friends in the engineering program.

Soon, demand for his 3D printing products outgrew his work space and his ability to keep up with the workload, so he contacted the Chamber of Business and Industry of Centre County and asked for their help in setting up a 3D printing business. The CBICC helped him secure an office at Innovation Park, and he hired some students and built a 3D printing business named Solid Dynamics, which focuses on rapid prototyping for a variety of industries.

3D printing, also called additive manufacturing, differs from traditional manufacturing, which takes a block of material and subtracts from it until all that’s left is the desired prototype or finished product. 3D printing adds layer upon layer to build a prototype or finished product. While injection molding is still the preferred method for producing parts in large volume, 3D printing is becoming the preferred way to rapidly design and engineer the prototypes for those products. More advanced 3D printers are being used to manufacture small batch products.

The highest priority for manufacturers is accelerating product development, which jumped from 29 percent in 2017 to 39 percent in 2018. Prototyping (55 percent), production (43 percent) and proof-of-concept models (41 percent) have been the three most-used 3D printing applications in 2018.

Sneaker companies have been using 3D printing to design sneaker midsoles. In April, Nike announced it made the first 3D-printed textile upper in performance footwear, called Flyprint.

Nike creates Flyprint using solid deposit modeling where the thermoplastic filament is unwound from a coil, melted, and then laid down in layers. Nike developed the printing process by modifying existing machines and said the method can be used to precisely engineer whatever sneaker the company wants to design.

“Making shoe insoles is a good example of prototyping,” said Sinclair.

“If Nike or some other shoe company came to me with an idea they had for a new shoe where the bottom layer had to be hard and the top layer needed to be squishy, we could use additive manufacturing to create products out of plastics that have different properties, so that one layer could be strong but brittle, another soft and elastic, and we could create various combinations of hardness in-between.

“Sneakers are a basic example of something you can create with a 3D printer, but anything that’s made of plastic can be created with additive manufacturing today.”

Actuated Medical, a medical device company in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, purchased a 3D printer seven years ago to develop prototypes.

“The big advantage is you can go from idea to drawing to a part in hand in a couple of hours rather than waiting days for a machinist, and by the time you get it back, it might not be what you wanted, or you’ve changed your direction,” said Roger Bagwell, director of research and development at Actuated Medical.

“If we have a medical device that needs a plastic battery case or a handset, which is the part that the clinician holds, we can make three prototypes and go to ten clinicians and get very quick feedback on which one they like best.

“We’re hoping to purchase higher- end 3D printers for manufacturing our medical devices – some companies are already doing that – but it’s challenging because we’re FDA-regulated, and we need to have a validated and controlled process for manufacturing medical devices versus making prototypes.”

While Solid Dynamics is not at liberty to reveal its clients, Sinclair said that they come from a variety of industries.

“Right now, the leaders in additive manufacturing are the aerospace and defense industries where companies such as Lockheed Martin use 3D prototypes to reduce manufacturing lead time,” said Sinclair.

“They’re followed by the oil and gas industry, the rest of the energy sector and manufacturers of consumer products.”

Additive manufacturing supplies a niche in each of these industries even though they’re very different from one another, which shows how broadly 3D printing can be applied.

“For consumer products, 3D printing doesn’t have the ability to churn out volumes of products like injection molding; however, it can very quickly speed up prototyping from an idea on paper to mass producing tens of thousands of products for the holiday season,” said Sinclair.

“The oil and gas industry and the energy sector, including solar and wind, also require prototypes before manufacturers mass produce parts, so they can verify that the part achieves its purpose under special conditions such as high pressure or high winds.

“The same goes for the defense industry, although on the defense side, 3D printing is good for replacing end user parts that are super critical.

“For example, if you’re a solider in Afghanistan and the knob on the air conditioner in your barrack breaks, it would cost about $300 to ship a replacement from the United States, and it might take a week to get there, but if you had a 3D printer onsite, you could fabricate that component, perhaps not to the specifications of the original component, but it will get you by during July and August when temperatures can average 110 degrees.”

Sinclair sees a bright future for his company and other 3D design and engineering firms.

“I expect to see exponential growth for additive manufacturing for at least the next ten years, perhaps as high as a 20 percent growth rate,” said Sinclair.