Insights
Technical explainers, industry trends, opinion pieces, and educational content from the AM community.
The Productivity Leap Behind Multi-Laser Metal Printing
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.
The Oxygen Window That Made Resin Printing Continuous
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.
Why 3D Printers Are Finally Learning to Curve
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.
The Reshoring Argument That Outlasted the Tariffs
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.
What It Takes to Get a 3D-Printed House Permitted
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.
How Cell Size Shapes Bioprinting Resolution
Extrusion bioprinting's resolution and the shear stress it puts on cells rise and fall together, because both trace back to forcing bioink through a nozzle wall. Light-based printing sidesteps the nozzle entirely, but the cell's own 10-20 micron diameter sets the finest scale either method can resolve.
Ten Years Since the First Printed Pill
Aprecia's Spritam opened the door to 3D-printed medicine in 2015. A decade of polypill research has pushed drug-loading efficiency past 96 percent, work that is now waiting on the regulatory pathway that would let a second printed drug follow Spritam to market.
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.