Insights
Technical explainers, industry trends, opinion pieces, and educational content from the AM community.
What Makes Generative Design Actually Generative?
Generative design software doesn't sculpt parts the way a person would - it grows them from a set of rules, and understanding that difference explains both the organic shapes and the odd surprises engineers run into.
The Densification Curve for Printed Ceramics
Binder jetting and vat photopolymerization both start a ceramic part well short of full density, and a maturing toolkit of powder packing, isostatic pressing, and sintering control is closing that gap layer by layer.
How Print Simulation Sees Warping Coming
Thermal simulation software now models an FDM print layer by layer as it cools, catching the warping a part will develop before it's ever extruded. Recent research shows both classic finite-element models and newer machine-learning hybrids are closing the gap between predicted and measured distortion.
Where Printing Beats Traditional Tooling
The choice between 3D printing and conventional manufacturing methods like injection molding or machining comes down to a specific volume threshold, and recent cost modeling shows exactly where that threshold sits and why it keeps shifting.
How Bioprinted Tissue Gets Its Blood Supply
Bioprinting solved the geometry of living tissue years before it solved the plumbing, and the last decade of vascularization research is largely the story of closing that gap.
Why AM Parts Still Struggle to Qualify
Additive manufacturing's biggest bottleneck isn't the printer anymore - it's proving statistically that a part will behave the same way twice, and the standards bodies are still catching up to how that should be done.
Why 3D-Printed Parts Miss Their Tolerance
Dimensional drift in FDM and SLA parts traces back to a specific chain of thermal and cure kinetics - not just printer calibration - and understanding it changes how tolerances should be specified.
The Recycled Filament Ceiling
Thermomechanical degradation limits how many times thermoplastic feedstock can be reprocessed for 3D printing, constraining how circular polymer additive manufacturing can actually become.
Where Two Materials Meet
Multi-material additive manufacturing lets a single build combine rigid and compliant, or dissimilar, materials without assembly, but the interface between them remains the part's weakest plane.
Where Printing Meets the Cutting Tool
Interleaving directed-energy deposition with in-envelope machining changes the residual stress budget that ultimately governs a hybrid-built part's accuracy and service life.
Continuous-Fiber Printing's Weak Interlayer
Continuous carbon-fiber 3D printing can match the tensile strength of conventional composites layer by layer, but interlaminar bonding and trapped voids between passes remain the process's defining weak point.
What Melt Pool Monitoring Can (and Can't) Catch in Metal 3D Printing
In-situ sensors watch the melt pool for the fraction of a second it exists, catching the keyhole instabilities that leave pores behind — but turning that detection into real-time process control remains the field's open problem.
Why 3D-Printed Ceramics Still Crack
Vat photopolymerization can print ceramic slurries to near-optical resolution, but debinding and sintering remain the steps that decide whether the part survives — and why shrinkage and cracking are still the field's defining problem.
Three Ways to Build in Metal
Laser powder bed fusion, directed energy deposition, and binder jetting reach full density through fundamentally different physics, each trading resolution, build rate, and cost differently.
Lattices That Design Themselves
Topology optimization and lattice infill are converging with additive manufacturing's own physical constraints, so that overhang angles and minimum feature size are now part of the mathematics that generates a part's shape, not an afterthought.