There has been exponential growth in the field of manufacturing technology with emerging concepts like additive manufacturing (AM). AM is a technique that adds or deposits layers of material to build 3D objects using digital 3D design. According to the authors, the paper addresses “the status, challenges, and future of [AM] in engineering.”

They present a comparative overview of AM using design flexibility, the cost of geometric complexity, dimensional accuracy, the need for assemblage, and time and cost efficiency in a production run. They further assemble the concurrent barriers and challenges of AM through “personal fabrication versus mass manufacturing,” “building scalability versus layer resolution,” “material heterogeneity and structural reliability,” and “AM standardization and intellectual property.” According to the authors, the printing attributes of AM processes are build time, feature resolution, surface quality, anchor and support material, and post processing. They briefly discuss the AM processes: “material extrusion, powder bed fusion, vat photopolymerization, material jetting, binder jetting, sheet lamination, and directed energy deposition.”

The authors presume the building capabilities of AM in multi-material printing, printed assemblies, embedding foreign components, and printing circuits, sensors, and batteries. They suggest geometric processing for AM fabrication using processing like hollowing and thickening, slicing, and support generation. They further discuss the computational tools in the development of natural user interface (UI)-driven shape modeling, including sketch-based design, gesture-based modeling, and tangible-based shape creation.

Furthermore, the authors project the educational stretch of AM to K-12 science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) outreach, creating a maker community, developing university-level informal learning environments, and promoting research opportunities. According to them, the future trends of AM are in “desktop fabrication”; conducting “research at the intersection of products, processes, and machines”; supporting “fragmentation of research investments and trends towards the print-it-all paradigm”; and “the need for rethinking and reorganizing manufacturing.”

This paper is an interesting read for engineering professionals and research scholars who are working in the area of 3D object design in manufacturing. The illustrations and explanations make reading worthwhile.