3D Printing for Medical and Dental Solutions – A Major 2018 Opportunity

Everybody in the 3D printing industry knows that printing for medical and dental markets is a longstanding area of commercial application –in fact, use of printers in these industries is amongst the oldest known use cases for technologies like stereolithography and laser sintering. For two decades, there have been a relatively narrow set of high value applications commercialized across various areas of healthcare, but those have helped create the backbone of today’s 3D printing industry and have propelled a number of key industry stakeholders to their current prominent position in the industry. Materialise, 3D Systems, Stratasys, EnvisionTEC, and EOS all come to mind.

The talk of the proverbial town for the last few years, however, has been all about the transitioning of various 3D printing technologies to “manufacturing” applications. What most of these conversations really are referring to is the adaptation of printing solutions –printers, materials, and software –to produce parts to be used in real products. There’s also a general understanding during these conversations that print technology for manufacturing would be producing such end-use parts in high volumes.

This calls to mind two broad areas of potential adoption which the industry at large is now working to develop attractive solutions for –consumer products manufacturers, and various industrial equipment and product manufacturers. Because much of the value proposition is being tied to ‘high value’ parts which can benefit from redesign to bring cost and performance benefits, industrial markets are getting a lot of attention when it comes to the development and marketing of the future of 3D printing/additive manufacturing.

Such a shift in focus to the industrial markets and related manufacturing applications has left the industry in a state of flux, with overall market growth in hardware responding accordingly. Outright growth has slowed somewhat while the effects of such a change cause ripple effects. During this period, however, we would call back the attention to the healthcare segment, where growth in 3D printing appears to continue to be flourishing and advancing in an increasingly differentiated way; one that may be highly attractive to stakeholders in both the short and long term.

According to our purpose-built market models, developed individually to capture the unique intricacies of each segment of healthcare 3D printing, the combined medical and dental markets for 3D printing will be worth an estimated $3.0B by the end of this year (a large portion of this being associated with printing and engineering services across both dental laboratories and outsourced medical manufacturers). In the primary segments consisting of just printer sales, material sales, and related software solutions, the opportunity is estimated to be some $740M.

Medical 3D Printing Question & Answer By SmarTech Publishing

Source: SmarTech Publishing

Healthcare 3D printing represents an attractive segment for both short and long term growth for a number of reasons. First, the breadth of applications across medical and dental segments are well served by today’s existing technologies, in some cases through the development of special medical materials. Printed components are sized relative to the human body, and thus can be manufactured by most systems, with a number of applications seeing print volumes globally of hundreds of thousands, to millions of components per year. Many applications are also highly valuable without the need for significant robust mechanical performance or resistant properties, including medical and dental models, surgical guides, custom instrumentation, and short to medium term prosthetics. Both low cost and professional 3D printers are often utilized today in both medical and dental markets, bringing a wide range of potentially disruptive cost benefits. Finally, healthcare applications are the continued subject of significant well funded medical research.

As a result of the ongoing opportunities in healthcare related 3D printing, SmarTech Publishing has partnered with 3Dprint.com to bring key stakeholders in the industry together at a new business and investment summit titled Additive Manufacturing Strategies – The Future of 3D Printing in Medicine and Dentistry. The conference, to be held in January of 2018, brings together all of collective leaders in medical and dental 3D printing to present strategic guidance and developments specific to healthcare 3D printing, powered by SmarTech’s ongoing analysis of the segment.

What’s the Big Deal with Additive Manufacturing Process Simulation Software?

This blog is a continuation of a multi-part blog series, following up the previous installment titled The Role of 3D Printing Software in Realizing the Dream of Advanced Digital Manufacturing. If you haven’t checked out that one yet, do yourself a favor and go read it. It will put into context the basis for this piece, which is a quick discussion of very important (and emerging) area of 3D printing software for the future.

If you’ve been paying attention to the 3D printing software space in the last year or two, you’ve probably noticed a whole lot of talk related to ‘simulation’ software tools. Although a lot of the work that has laid the foundation for several early commercial projects now on the market for additive simulation have been under development for a number of years, chatter about this corner of the software market with regards to 3D printing might seem like it’s come out of nowhere. Manufacturing simulation software tools aren’t anything new –the concept of simulating various elements of the design and manufacturing process of parts has been around for many years. Why all of the recent attention from this community of manufacturing software developers on additive?

The answer, as you can guess, is probably somewhat more complex than what I’m about to offer, but for the sake of simplicity, there are likely two primary reasons.

First, metal additive manufacturing technologies have become significantly more adopted in the arena of high value, complex, production parts within the last three years thanks primarily to the aerospace industry. With a few well known components now in various stages of implementation and production in this area, other industries are quickly beginning to scale up as well. This has naturally moved the process into the sights of worldwide CADCAM and PLM software giants, whom already provide a number of simulation based software tools to manufacturing clients.

The other, more important reason follows the theme of this blog series laid out in the last installment, which is the theory that additive manufacturing or 3D printing is the digital manufacturing process of the future. This means that, though other methods of manufacturing can indeed be included as a digitized process today, additive processes posses the greatest potential to realize the true benefits of digital manufacturing overall.

So, what’s the big deal with additive manufacturing simulation software? Well, let’s dive just a little bit deeper and explore some more themes from SmarTech’s latest market research report on 3D printing software. Simulation software is a big focus for 3D printing software development for two big reasons.

The first one is a bit obvious at this point, and is best demonstrated in the area of metal additive manufacturing –and especially metal powder bed fusion. In fact, there are about a half dozen tools currently in some form of early commercial development which are focusing primarily on simulating this process.

This is because the current standard of use for metal powder bed fusion technology comes with a number of complex technical challenges that usually end up resulting in extra time and costs, reducing the benefits of AM –sometimes considerably. Failed builds using metal powder bed fusion result from a lack of visibility between design changes or build set-up through to the actual building of the part. Without a way to simulate the additive process, engineers make design changes essentially blind to the potential for the design or set-up decisions they make to make the build fail –resulting in huge delays and cost increases. Of course, there is a correction for this which certain companies in the industry are now becoming quite good at –experience through trial and error (and again, lots of wasted money and slow implementation).

Today’s tools seek to give users of metal additive manufacturing a way to gain insight on their design and build set up strategies and decisions in order to reduce or eliminate potential failures, before the manufacturing or printing even begins. This is important because it removes the barrier of process specific experience that is currently required and limiting adoption of additive manufacturing technologies to a select few organizations.

This primary reason is the path to fast adoption of such software tools, and one of the reasons we see AM process simulation software growing from less than $5M part of the chain today, to nearly a $170M portion of the 3D printing software market by 2027.  But that figure actually doesn’t speak to the second second area of integration for simulation-based software technologies in AM’s future –one that has perhaps even larger implications.

One of the reasons we believe additive manufacturing/3D printing is the digital manufacturing technology is because today’s additive processes have the greatest potential for digital control compared to incumbent subtractive technologies. Not only is the actual geometric shape of the part being formed under digital control, but the actual material properties of the part are also being formed digitally in the same process. Material properties in AM can be influenced both by geometry through complex designs only possible through AM, and also through microstructural control as the material itself is fused, melted, or otherwise distributed in a volume of space.

Because of the potential to control the entirety of the manufacturing process in a digital manner (rather than just the shaping of the part), simulation tools can potentially realize even greater benefits than ever before. It can be leveraged during the design process to automate and inform engineers intelligently, while providing a means of “digital certification” for parts. On the back end, it can be paired with emerging in-situ process monitoring capabilities of additive machines to confirm the expected simulated outcomes with real time build data. The latter two components can be finally combined with digital inspection software to form a concept that we call the ‘AM Quality Assurance Continuum’ powered by software, visualized below.

AM Process Simulation Software

Clearly, additive process simulation is a big deal for the future of AM. In the next and final installment of this series,  we explore the final piece of the concept for The Role of 3D Printing Software in Realizing the Dream of Advanced Digital Manufacturing –how 3D printing and process simulation software combine to enable the future of generative design and digital manufacturing.