3D Manufacturing Capabilities

                With the 3D printing industry rapidly growing, the limits to 3-D manufacturing limits are constantly being redefined. 3D printing also known as additive manufacturing is “the process of making three dimensional solid objects from a digital model”.  Although the idea of 3D printing began in the 1980s, the term was not officially coined until 1995, where a group of MIT students designed an inkjet printer that extruded a binding solution onto a bed of powder rather than ink onto paper. Since then, 3D printing has been a rapidly growing field because of it’s vast

                Surprisingly, although 3D printing is gearing towards new medical developments such as nano scale objects, there is a big interest in 3-D printing on a much greater scale. In fact, according to Yahoo News, “Behrokh Khoshnevis at the University of Southern California … has figured out a way to build housing with a giant 3D printer.” Yahoo might not be a credible source but this professor has been featured on different sites, and Matthew Tedesco also referenced this scientist.  Of course this would require a large scale printer, that would be bigger than the house its building, and it would build through a concrete layering system called Contour crafting. Although the method of extrusion printing we have now creates a lot of waste, 3D printing is gearing towards precision printing such as Contour crafting. Contour crafting prints objects “as is” without creating any additional waste. The professor believes that this would not only help commercial building be more efficient and less costly, but that this project can extend to even the poor slums and less fortunate societies. Being able to build a house at around 20 hours, can greatly reduce the costs for anyone and increase production rates by an unknown exponential rate.

                I believe that 3D manufacturing is essential to the future of construction and engineering, because at the current rate there’s no limits as to what we can build, and how fast we can build it.The 3D printers already exist, and it's only a matter of time before they're manufactured in a cheap commercial scale. 

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/3d-printer-could-build-house-20-hours-224156687.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_printing

http://www.explainingthefuture.com/3dprinting.html

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ciocentral/2012/12/07/manufacturing-the-future-10-trends-to-come-in-3d-printing/