3D Printing The Next Five Years by Felix Ewald, CEO & Co-founder of DyeMansion

This is a guest post in our series looking at the future of 3D Printing. To celebrate 5 years of reporting on the 3D printing industry, we’ve invited industry leaders and 3D printing experts to give us their perspective and predictions for the next 5 years and insight into trends in additive manufacturing.

Felix Ewald is the CEO & Co-founder of染色。DyeMansion为未来生产设施提供了自动制造解决方案。内部开发的后处理解决方案涵盖了制成零件后的每一步，并专门针对激光烧结塑料进行了优化

Industrial manufacturing with plastics and 3D Printing: The next 5 years by Felix Ewald

对于添加剂制造塑料来说，这是一个非常激动人心的时刻。尽管在过去的两年中，金属3D印刷引起了很多关注，并将炒作从塑料中转移了出来，但这种技术及其最新进展不应在将来被低估。

HP’s Multi Jet Fusion is hitting the market with full power and Carbon’s case studies show that SLA is still in the game when it comes to industrial manufacturing in the future, 3D systems announced huge price drops for their SLS printers, new materials are extending the market and last but not least, small & affordable SLS machines bring high priced manufacturing technologies to the masses without any big investments for smaller companies.

总的来说，在AM塑料市场上的好时光，因此是染色体的好时光，因为我们的目标是将基于粉末的塑料的后生产化。那么，未来5年将会发生什么？

Machines will be faster – prices will drop.

The main cost drivers for AM plastics are speed and costs of the machines, material- and personnel cost. Competition will be the accelerator for the first two points. Especially the printing speed will increase dramatically within the next 5 years. Multi Jet Fusion / High Speed Sintering / CLIP are just the beginning of a race towards ultimately fast printers.

The decrease of material costs is a bit more complicated to achieve since 3D printing of plastics is a very complex topic and materials are usually fixed to each technology. This does not only mean that one is generally required to buy the materials from the machine supplier but that it’s very difficult for new suppliers to enter the market. In my opinion, there will be only a small decrease regarding the material costs over the next 5 years. The main driver for cost savings will be faster and more efficient machines as well as automated post production steps.

Powder based technologies vs. Stereolithography

虽然HP和EOS的碳押注对基于粉末的技术，而3D系统则两者兼而有之。每种技术都有其优势。

Whereas SLA is more popular in the US, powder bed fusion is the leading technology in Europe. The next 5 years will definitely show which technology will be the holy grail when it comes to future manufacturing. At DyeMansion, we rely on powder based technologies. No support structures, real materials & scaleable productivity. We believe that these aspects are the keys to high volume manufacturing.

Expectations & adoption of different industries

By adoption I mean the slope of enlightenment of the Gartner hype cycle. It remains to be seen how big the impact of additive manufacturing will be in 5 years. 3D printing has a lot of big advantages compared to conservative manufacturing technologies. Obviously there are some restrictions which do not fit into the mindset of the old economy.

该行业将花费更多的时间来采用加性思维方式。采用进度的一个重要主题将是打印机周围的整个环境。当然，一切都始于思维定势，但是对打印机还有许多其他影响以及可以加速采用增材制造的成本。

大型展示案例和项目，大行业参与者的承诺，软件，教育，后期制作的自动化等等。AM塑料中未来制造的竞赛刚刚开始。接下来的5年肯定会对那里的每3D印刷爱好者进行爆炸。

This is a guest post in our series looking at the future of 3D Printing, if you’d like to participate in this series then contact us for more information.

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Featured image shows Felix Ewald, CEO & Co-founder of DyeMansion.