Advantages, Disadvantages and Limitations of additive manufacturing

  

Advantages of additive manufacturing 

• comfortable to operate from home or office.

• noise free, pollution free.

• Highly customisable.

•  Tools, molds or punches not required and reduced material wastage.

•  Less time for the product to reach the market for customer end use.

• More complex parts and undercuts, internal features can be easily built in a single part.

• Extra complexity of a part comes at no additional production cost. 

• Operator intervention work is greatly reduced to a supervisory level 

• More efficient production.

Disadvantages of additive manufacturing

•  expensive equipment and materials.

• The actual process of printing a part can be slow compared to traditional counterparts.

•  plastic parts that would take seconds to make with injection molding could take hours with a 3D printer.

•  The surface finish is very rough compared to traditional powder metal materials.

•  dimensional control means tolerance is required due to shrinkage during sintering.

•  layered effect  inherent in additive manufacturing part construction.

Limitations of additive manufacturing

• part size: in the case of powder bed technology, the part size is limited to powder bed size. 

• material properties: parts made by additive manufacturing tend to show anisotropy in the Z Axis means in the construction direction.

• production series: the additive manufacturing process are generally suitable for unitary or small series and is not relevant for mass production, but progress are made to increase machine productivity and thus the production of larger series.

• Besides the density of 99.9% can be reached, there can be some residual internal porosities.

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