Additive manufacturing — 3-D printing — is on the cusp of being adopted more widely by industry — still:
In May, Goodyear opened a $77 million plant in Luxembourg that centers on 3-D printing and can make tires four times faster in small batches than with conventional production. Goodyear also is testing its new 3-D printed airless tire technology on Tesla electric vehicles and Starship Technologies’ autonomous delivery robots. It has been working for the past several years on improved manufacturing techniques at an R&D center near Columbus, Ohio.
By 2030, Goodyear aims to bring maintenance-free and airless tires to market, and 3-D printing is part of that effort for the Akron-based tire-making leader founded in 1898 and named after innovator Charles Goodyear. Currently, about 2% of its production is through additive manufacturing and more integration into the mix is in sight.
“Like with any innovation, targeting the right use case is key. 3-D printing is not for every job. We’re using additive manufacturing for higher-end, ultra-high performance tires that require much more complexity, and in smaller lot sizes,” said Chris Helsel, senior vice president, global operations and CTO at Goodyear. “There is still a benefit of making large runs of tires efficiently through a normal assembly line.”
Leveraging the new technology takes patience. “You can’t bring it in, turn it on. It is not a short journey. We have been on this route for 10-12 years,” Helsel said. In an initial commercialization of its 3-D printed airless tires in 2017, Goodyear started equipping premium lawnmower models made by Bad Boy Mowers.
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Primarily useful for making specialized high-value parts and smaller production volumes, Bromberger pegged additive manufacturing at 2-3% of the $12 trillion production market.
3-D printing industry consultant Wohlers Associates expects additive manufacturing to grow at a relatively strong pace and predicts the market worldwide will reach $85.3 billion in 2031 from $15.2 billion in 2021. The leading industrial sector using the technology is aerospace, followed by medical/dental and automotive, while the most common applications for 3-D printing are for making end-use parts and functional prototypes, according to the firm’s Wohlers Report 2022.
The main advantages of the technology include design flexibility in various 3-D shapes that can perform better or cost less, and customized production of parts. Other advantages are cutting out time-consuming, pre-production processes and making products on-demand from digital files.
A chief barrier to adoption is investment costs. Prices for industrial 3-D printing machines can vary from $25,000 to $500,000 and up to $1 million for huge systems. Further limitations are a lack of engineering talent to implement the technology, a knowledge gap among businesses about why and how to use it, cultural resistance on the shop floor to change, and too few end-to-end 3-D printing systems.
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But stock market reception of 3-D printing as a pure-play investment theme has not been good in recent years. Desktop Metal has lost almost 80% of its value since going public in 2021, and the performance of other 3-D printing sector plays has been poor even as the technology advances.
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For Boeing’s Millennium Space Systems subsidiary, acquired in 2018 as a maker of small satellites for the national security space, 100% 3-D printed satellites have been made this year with 30% less cost and a five-month reduction in production lead time. A regular user of the technology for several years, Boeing also has 3-D printed parts for helicopters and seats for the Starliner spacecraft, as well as components for the Boeing 787, and tooling for 787 aircraft wings.
I don’t see the price of the machines as prohibitive. Standard machining stations and cells are commonly over $250,000. Three things are the measure of any part or process: cost, reliabilty and quality. Control these and you can build anything you want, additive or subtractive.