ABSTRACT
Additive manufacturing (AM) is pervasively revolutionizing the manufacturing landscape, from family businesses to multinational corporations, and it is enabling innovation across a broad range of industries, products and applications. This strong influence stems from AM’s distinctive features and variety of processes, and the fact that AM exploits and benefits from various disciplines, such as biology, chemistry, computer science, engineering, materials science, medicine, metallurgy, physics, and so on. AM is also disrupting business models, and has even achieved cost-effective mass customization (previously an oxymoron) in specific products. AM generates objects of size ranging from microns to tens of meters, corresponding f.e. to biological tissues and construction, respectively.
This chapter describes the commercial and experimental AM processes and feedstocks, and focuses mostly on sustainable polymeric feedstocks. It starts with an introduction to AM that includes the families of AM processes, and their specific working principles, applications, and current and future market. The basic concepts are presented for the following classes of AM processes: binder jetting, direct energy deposition, direct writing, material extrusion, material jetting, powder bed fusion, sheet lamination, and vat photopolymerization. Types, commercial and experimental versions, properties, and requirements of polymeric feedstocks are illustrated for each process family and version as well, in order to provide benchmarks, indications, and a guide to formulators of new sustainable polymers and product developers for AM. The working principles and polymeric feedstocks of bioprinting and 4D printing are also explained. AM technologies unveiled in the last few years and those not mainstream are also described, offering a most updated and comprehensive overview of AM technologies. The chapter concludes with a forecast of the near future of AM in unfilled polymers and polymeric composites, processes and printers, and areas of application that include aerospace, automotive, biomedical and pharmaceutical, and architecture, buildings, and construction. More than 450 references are listed that comprise mostly very recent technical research papers and reviews, and patents.
