Splitting a powder bed across multiple lasers is cutting metal 3D printing's production costs by 60 to 70 percent and, in one demonstrated case, multiplying deposition rate sixfold - but only when the downstream process scales with it.
Oct 13, 2026
How a precisely engineered 'dead zone' of still-liquid resin, held open by a thin film of oxygen, let one printing process trade stop-and-go curing for one unbroken pull.
Oct 11, 2026
For three decades, 3D printers have built objects in flat horizontal layers, turning sloped surfaces into tiny staircases. New slicing math from 2025 is finally making curved, non-planar layers fast enough to use.
Oct 7, 2026
In February 2026 the Supreme Court erased the legal basis for most of the tariffs additive manufacturing had been selling as a reshoring tailwind. The industry's business case barely flinched, and that gap says more about what actually drives AM adoption than the tariffs themselves ever did.
Oct 4, 2026
A 3D-printed concrete wall can go up in a fraction of the labor hours a framing crew needs, yet most of these houses still get approved one jurisdiction at a time instead of under a standard building code. The bottleneck has moved from the printer to the paperwork, and a recent cost study shows the economics have moved with it.
A twice-monthly newsletter rounding up our latest coverage, from AppliedAM.
AppliedAM accepts research write-ups, case studies, and technical explainers from practitioners across the AM community.
Grad student and AM professional Ayman Ahdy is using rare access to wire laser metal deposition equipment to study bimetallic printing, joining mild steel and stainless steel for cheaper, corrosion-resistant marine parts.
Read nowJun 14, 2026
Graduate student Rebecca Kaaya Nansubuga is developing an open-source 3D-printed orthopedic surgical positioning table, bringing a $200,000 piece of operating room equipment within reach of any facility with a desktop printer.
Aug 30, 2026
The FDA built its first dedicated review pathway for additive manufactured devices in 2017, after more than a hundred 3D-printed implants had already reached patients under general device rules, and the point-of-care question it raised in 2021 is still open.
Aug 28, 2026
Rail operators, navies, and heavy industry are starting to store spare parts as CAD files instead of steel, printing them only when a machine breaks. The economics only work for some parts, but where they work, they upend how a maintenance budget gets spent.
Peer-reviewed findings from AppliedAM's contributors and the wider AM research community.
Market moves, new capacity, and the business side of additive manufacturing.
Real production runs and real lessons from teams using AM at scale.
Explainers and analysis on the technology, economics, and practice of AM.
Sep 9, 2026
Most desktop 3D printers run on firmware nobody at the company wrote, and that borrowed code is a big reason hobbyist machines caught up to industrial ones so quickly.
Sep 8, 2026
A single certified aerospace or medical part now needs an unbroken data trail back to its powder lot, machine parameters, and build monitoring records. Here's what that digital thread costs to build, and why it's becoming the real product.
Sep 6, 2026
Electron beam melting holds the entire powder bed near 700°C, erasing the thermal gradient that leaves laser-printed metal parts residually stressed, but the mechanism it trades that problem for shows up just as clearly once the fatigue data comes in.
Sep 5, 2026
From a plastic printer fixing its own faceplate on the ISS in 2014 to a stainless-steel bracket melted in microgravity a decade later, additive manufacturing's slow climb into orbit shows each generation solving exactly the problem the last one couldn't.
Insights · Sep 2, 2026
Insights · Sep 1, 2026
Insights · Aug 27, 2026
Insights · Aug 24, 2026
Insights · Aug 24, 2026
Insights · Aug 16, 2026
Insights · Aug 11, 2026
Insights · Aug 6, 2026
A twice-monthly newsletter rounding up our latest research, industry, case studies, and insights coverage - straight from the AppliedAM editorial team.
