Manufacturers’ New Star Trek Technology

Source: http://texaslynn.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/star-trek-replicator.jpg

Plucking molecules out of the air and reconfiguring them into Earl Grey tea (hot) or ghargh (You never had ghargh!) was Gene Roddenberry’s way of ensuring an adequate food supply for star ships that boldly went where no one had gone before.

Well, manufacturers have stolen a page from Roddenberry and devised a machine that uses “computer-generated information to add fine, powder-like material layer by layer and fused by heat or laser to form an object without part-specific tooling,” the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering (CASE) reported last summer. This additive manufacturing technology—also referred to as 3D Printing—appears to have many benefits, including precisely made products with little or no waste.

In the not too distant past, machinists had to set up tools to make specific parts, which took time, energy, and material. By reducing lead-time and tooling costs, additive manufacturing gets the parts to their customers faster, CASE explains. But there’s more: Because the additive manufacturing doesn’t require molds, manufacturers can make parts in different sizes, something that’s “particularly valuable for manufacturing medical devices that can be individualized for each patient.”
If you want to see what additive manufacturing looks like, view this video:

What you’ll see is definitely not your father’s . . . excuse me, grandfather’s tool and die machine. But, like most new technology, additive manufacturing is creating a disturbance in the force, and that’s the subject of Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee’s new book, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (2014), and a future posting. If you can’t want for the posting, read this PBS interview with the authors.