Insights
Technical explainers, industry trends, opinion pieces, and educational content from the AM community.
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.
The Warehouse That Never Holds the Part
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.
Why Your Printer Moves the Way It Does
The frame geometry that carries a printer's nozzle around the build plate, not the nozzle itself, decides how fast it can print cleanly, and software can only compensate for so much of what geometry gets wrong.
The Orientation Decision Nobody Optimizes
Rotating a part before it prints can more than double its ductility, multiply interfacial bond strength between dissimilar materials nearly fourfold, and decide whether a surface needs sanding, yet most slicing software still leaves the choice to whatever angle the model happened to load in.