Archive
Every AppliedAM article, across research, industry, case studies, and insights, in one chronological list.
The Printer That Blends Materials Like Paint
A PolyJet printer does not commit to one plastic and stay there. It jets multiple photopolymer resins droplet by droplet under UV light, so a single part can shift from rubber-soft to hard as it prints, the way a paint mixer blends two cans into every shade in between.
What It Takes to 3D Print Glass
Molten thermoplastic flows the moment it clears its melting point. Glass resists a printer for a different reason: its viscosity crosses several orders of magnitude before it counts as printable at all, and two MIT projects have found opposite ways through that window.
The Math Behind Digital Spare Parts
Additive manufacturing lets a company store a spare part as a CAD file instead of a warehoused object, printing it only when a machine breaks down. The economics only favor that trade for a specific slice of a parts catalog, and a recent cost study puts a number on exactly how narrow that slice is.
Why STL Still Won't Die
3D printing has had a better file format than STL for over a decade. Almost everything downloaded online still arrives in the older one, and the reason has little to do with engineering.
The Economics of Recycling a Printed Part
Additive manufacturing built its sustainability pitch on how little material it wastes while printing. What happens to a part once it's done being useful is a separate question, and the recycling infrastructure built for mono-material waste mostly can't answer it yet.
How Dry Is Dry Enough for FDM Filament
The chemistry behind filament moisture absorption, and why the popular one-time drying fix holds up far better for some materials than others.
Why Jet Fusion Powder Doesn't Wear Out
Multi Jet Fusion reuses up to 80 percent of its nylon powder every build, and the chemistry explains why the parts rarely seem to notice.
Printing the Circuit Into the Part
A decade after Voxel8 promised a single printer that could wire itself, 3D printed electronics settled into three narrower, more durable techniques instead of the one-machine dream it started from.
The Open-Source Backbone Behind Every Desktop 3D Printer
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.
The Paper Trail Behind a Certified Printed Part
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.
How Electron Beam Melting Prints Titanium Stress-Free
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.
How 3D Printing Found Its Way to Orbit
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.
Who Carries the Liability for a Defective Printed Part?
Traditional product liability assumes one manufacturer holds the duty of care, but a 3D-printed part can pass through five separate hands before it's installed, and insurers are still figuring out who to bill.
How PEEK's Crystallinity Determines a Successful Print
PEEK is semicrystalline, and getting a strong print comes down to managing that chemistry deliberately: the chamber temperature it needs, the cooling rate that lets it crystallize, and the mechanical properties that follow from getting both right.
How 4D Printing Teaches Polymers to Change Shape
A shape memory polymer can be printed flat, folded into a shape that has no business holding still, and left alone until heat or light tells it to unfold into the part it was actually designed to be.
Solving Ceramic Printing's Slowest Step
Thermal debinding has kept 3D-printed ceramic parts on a 20-to-100-hour timeline for years, because burning off resin too fast cracks the part. A new vacuum-and-graphite-felt process from UT Dallas cuts that to under 30 minutes.
How Metal Bonds Without Ever Melting
Cold spray fires metal powder fast enough to fuse on impact alone, letting shops rebuild titanium and aluminum aircraft parts without a heat-affected zone, but proving that impact actually produced a sound bond is still the harder half of the problem.
The Chemistry That Finishes a Resin Print
A part fresh off an SLA or DLP printer is only 50 to 85 percent polymerized. What post-cure actually does, chemically, to close that gap, and why time alone is the wrong variable to control it with.
Photopolymer Resins Built to Be Undone
Stereolithography and DLP resins have always cured into permanent, unrecyclable networks. A decade of work on dynamic covalent chemistry is quietly rewriting that assumption, one reversible bond at a time.
How 3D-Printed Implants Actually Get FDA Clearance
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.