3rd ‘Additive Manufacturing the Future’ Programme

The years of the COVID-19 pandemic have pushed many countries to seek ways to navigate through the stand-still the world came to for a significant amount of time. It has also triggered the pursuit of preparedness for any potential future similar shocks. It became obvious to manufacturers that resilience and agility are as important as efficiency. Additive Manufacturing (AM) is now attracting even more interest than before the pandemic from decision-makers around the globe for its promises of self-sufficiency, among other advantages.

AM has created a paradigm shift in today’s business models across the globe in terms of decision speed, adaptability, agility, complexity, and inclusivity of technologies. Globally AM has matured enough for adoption in a plethora of sectors (space, defence, medical, aerospace, automotive, oil & gas, energy, tooling etc). AM’s benefits are driving the global impact we are seeing nowadays. Wohlers Report 2022 marked a growth of 19.5% in the AM industry in 2021, compared to 7.5% in 2020 (impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic). The global AM market size is estimated to reach USD 76.16 billion by 2030, growing at a compound annual growth rate CAGR of 20.8% (reported by Businesswire).

In the future, it is envisaged that both AM, and conventional manufacturing will play equal key roles in manufacturing capabilities. Benefits of AM include innovation (performance and environmental gains), part consolidation (eliminate the need for design for manufacture and assembly, reduction in assembly-line footprint), low energy consumption (less materials, lighter products, by-products’ reuse), less waste (90% cost reduction potential, reducing ‘cradle-to-grave’ environmental footprint, lower human production error), reduced time-to-market (no need for tooling), light-weighting (lower energy consumption in application), sustainability (resources-efficient), and manufacturing agility (fast response to market changes).

The advantages AM promises to various sectors are reflected on a myriad of applications, some of them are in our everyday use. Improving these is guaranteed to improve the life quality, as can be seen in lighter electronic gadgets, custom prosthetics, security, among others. In this talk, an overview of the state-of-the-art of laser-based AM achievements and use cases will be presented.