Additive Manufacturing: Three Current Limitations Of Additive Manufacturing

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Current Limitations of Additive Manufacturing In additive manufacturing, parts are produced by slicing a CAD model into thin layers and then depositing material one layer at a time to create the 3D part. While current methods are very precise and have high resolutions, I have identified 3 main limitations of additive manufacturing. Inability to Produce Smooth and Continuous Contours Due to the way material is put together additive manufacturing is currently unable to produce parts with rounded contours and smooth surface finish. Because parts are built up in discrete layers, there will be a “staircase effect” for curved or sloped profiles. Parts then require further processing if a smooth surface finish is required. Also, depending on the …show more content…

In hybrid machines, the additive print head is typically treated as an interchangeable CNC tool, which can automatically be swapped out for other milling tools. Because additive manufacturing is much more efficient with materials compared to milling, hybrid systems are intended to produce a part predominantly though the additive process as opposed to milling. Material is first deposited layer-wise by additive manufacturing to obtain a part which is close to its final shape, and then followed by CNC milling to obtain the final part . Advantages of Hybrid Manufacturing Hybrid manufacturing systems combine CNC milling with additive manufacturing to fully tap on the benefits each method can offer. The end result is an all-in-one machine that is capable to produce final products with complex features quickly and efficiently. No Post-Processing Needed Milling offers the advantages of being highly precise and having much smoother surface finish (surface roughness of easily around 1 µm ) compared to powder bed fusion additive manufacturing (layer thickness in the range of 20 µm and above; surface roughness of 15 µm and above ). Flat surfaces and sharp corners can be obtained with CNC milling. Similarly, features such as threads and holes are more accurately created through

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