3D printing – The OM Blog by Heizer, Render, & Munson

OM in the News: Eight Drivers for Manufacturing’s Next 50 Years

In the last several decades, we’ve seen major disruptions to the manufacturing environment. We experienced the “China Price,” which prompted offshoring of manufacturing operations, nearly decimating U.S. manufacturing. More recently we’ve seen the trend toward personalized products, resulting in smaller lot sizes, thus straining traditional economies of scale production. And the “Amazon Effect” of rapid turnaround in orders and delivery times of 2 days or less continues to challenge the longer lead times typical in manufacturing.

“What might manufacturing look like in 2030, or 2070?” asks Industry Week (Feb, 10, 2020). In the future we will still have large-volume, low-mix operations that will continue to harvest the advantages of economies of scale production. However, the competitive dynamics of manufacturing will change for a large portion of the traditional manufacturing world. Industry Week sees 8 drivers to the future:

1. Quality will still be Job 1, but how we achieve it will change. With sensors everywhere, critical operational variables will be exposed.

2. Economies of scale will coexist with economies of one production. 3D printing/additive manufacturing technologies will have matured and will be cost competitive.

3. Because of 3D printing, production will be more closely tied to either the location of these raw materials or the location of the customer.

4. Automation will continue to replace repetitive tasks, and the costs of robots and their control systems will decline to a point where even smaller manufacturers can take advantage of them.

5. Products will be made through naturalistic design and their materials will be functionally graded to combine materials in new ways.

6. Humans and digital tools will not only coexist; they will be tightly integrated through AI. Wearables and exoskeleton supports will increase human performance and improve safety.

7. Strategic partners will collaborate to create end-to-end solutions that manufacturers can deploy with limited tweaking.

8. Manufacturing operations will be guided by a unified architecture that links the edge (asset) to the cloud.

Classroom discussion questions:

What changes do you think will take place in manufacturing in the next decade?
Where can 3D printing play a role in change?

OM in the News: Israeli Startup Races to Roll Out 3D Printed Steaks

The walls of Redefine Meat Ltd.’s lab in Rehovot, Israel, are plastered with posters of cuts of beef, including sirloins, T-bones, and rib-eyes. But the startup isn’t looking to sell the perfect cut of beef. Instead, it wants to create a plant-based facsimile. The company is building a 3D printer that it says will produce a meatless steak that’s so fatty, juicy, and perfectly meaty that even the most dedicated carnivore won’t know the difference. “All meat alternatives today are basically a meat-homogeneous mass,” says Redefine Meat’s CEO. “If you 3D-print it, you can control what’s happening inside the mass to improve the texture and to improve the flavor.”

Redefine Meat says that 3D printing promises to give diners the same sensory experience as eating a real T-bone or rump roast, writes BusinessWeek (Nov. 25, 2019). The technology involves developing a design that can then be printed countless times. First, proprietary computer software creates a detailed model of a steak, including the muscle, fat, and blood, based on whichever cut it’s emulating. That blueprint is then transmitted to a printer loaded with plant-based “inks.” Hit the start button and out comes a “steak.”

While ground-meat replacements are widely available, mimicking an actual cut of meat has proved far more challenging. That’s because replicating the mouthfeel and visual appeal of a juicy sirloin is a lot tougher than cranking out something that’s going to be slapped between a bun. “A beefsteak is the holy grail of plant-based meat,“ says one exec.

The faux-meat category has already reached an estimated $14 billion in annual sales worldwide, and will grow to $140 billion in 2029. Redefine Meat plans to introduce its plant-based steaks to the public in the first quarter of 2020. It will supply customers, including restaurants, meat distributors, and retailers, with both the printers and cartridges. Redefine Meat’s printer can now deliver five 7-ounce steaks in an hour. The company hopes to speed that up to 22 pounds by the end of 2020. That will mean 50 servings an hour, or the equivalent of a cow’s worth of steak a day.

Classroom discussion questions:

What are the OM issues involved in “printing” a steak?
Will this new product be as successful as an Impossible Burger?

OM in the News: A Revolution in 3D Printing

Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM), which was invented in 1989, is probably what you imagine when you think of 3D printing. Traditionally, the technology melts spool-fed tubes of thermoplastic material and extrude the molten plastics in thin layers on a heated build-plate, building new parts from scratch slowly upwards, layer by careful layer. “It is the technique used by about 90% of the 3D printers in use today,” writes New Equipment Digest (Sept. 12, 2016).