3D printing

The IDTechEx Show! on April 10-11 in Berlin brings together eight key disruptive technologies and their customers at one venue.

3D Printing of composites is becoming an increasingly explored commercial opportunity. Approaching this from two directions: the 3D Printing industry are looking for functional enhancements to assist industrial uptake and meanwhile the traditional composites industry is looking at ways to allow more design freedom, accelerate time to market, and reduce the costs for low-production volume.

3D printing is rapidly reaching industrial commercialisation in numerous sectors; IDTechEx forecast that the total market will be worth $22bn by 2028. One of the key features is the design freedom this technology enables where, alongside other functional advantages, a major opportunity is in lightweighting.

NEO Tech AMT GmbH is one of the leading companies developing systems for 3D Printed Electronics (3D PE). The company installed the first 5 axis 3D PE system in 2010. Rapid advances lead to the first commercial installation for mass production for printed 3D circuits in mobile communications devices in 2015.

Though activities in 3D bioprinting have been growing in leaps and bounds since 2015, the activity we have seen in 2018 has been truly remarkable for this fledgling field. Finally, governments, academic institutions and companies alike are beginning to understand the value that 3D bioprinting can bring and are working hard together to bring disruptive change through building tissues from scratch.

Advancements in material science and material processing will always play a central role in any technological progression. IDTechEx has been providing leading market analysis on a broad range of advanced materials and their technology analysts have given their pick of the key news stories from 2018.

At the IDTechEx Show! Callaghan Innovation showcased MicroMaker, a new type of 3D printing for microstructures. MicroMaker enables fast, easy and affordable fabrication of miniaturized structures for innumerable applications such as printed electronics, wearables, sensors and point of care devices.

Technology analyst Dr Bryony Core reports on her findings at the IDTechEx Show! Santa Clara 2018

Approximately 3,500 attendees from 42 countries attended the IDTechEx Show!, which featured 284 exhibiting organizations. The event, held in Santa Clara, California, is unique in bringing together eight key technologies with the organizations that seek to use them.

From its humble beginnings in the late 1980s, through to the global force that it is today, the capabilities of 3D printing technology have expanded dramatically, to establish itself as an attractive manufacturing solution for prototyping and production.