Insights
Technical explainers, industry trends, opinion pieces, and educational content from the AM community.
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.
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.