Recognizing the need to maintain competitive technological advantage against adversaries, the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) has been organizing a strategy to implement additive manufacturing (AM) – also known as 3D printing – across its vast enterprise. Though AM technologies are varied in their materials and methods, they can [...]
VEXTEC is honored to be part of this year’s AIAA SciTech Forum (The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics). As the world’s largest aerospace technical society, AIAA’s annual SciTech Forum and Exposition is the preeminent event for aerospace research and technology. The 2021 event was originally scheduled to be [...]
Conventional manufacturing suffers from a lack of innovation for one very obvious reason: Everything’s been tried before. Manufacturers already know what works and what doesn’t, so there’s little incentive to experiment — especially when it comes to new materials for product development. With additive manufacturing, that situation reverses. Manufacturers [...]
If you took apart a brand new aircraft piece by piece, you’d likely find numerous items created through additive manufacturing: cabin parts, engine components, air ducting, brackets, and many more. Manufacturers already use 3D printing and various types of additive manufacturing (AM) to expedite the design and build process [...]
Designers employ the additive manufacturing process and 3D printers for rapid prototyping — to turn ideas into objects as soon as possible. They don’t use them for much else, though, particularly in terms of production. Why is that? To answer that question, one only needs to look at the [...]
Not long ago, additive manufacturing was just a concept — and 3D printers mainly took up space in university laboratories. But take a look now. Additive manufacturing technologies are now priority investments for Tier 1 and Tier 2 manufacturers. There is still work to do before these approaches “transform” [...]
If you haven’t been tracking the state of the additive manufacturing (AM) industry closely, you may have missed some exciting recent developments. Additive manufacturing applications and the technologies that power them have come so far so fast, that Tier 1 and Tier 2 manufacturers across several industries are now [...]
VEXTEC is proud to present at the 2020 ASME AM Medical Virtual Event – Additive Manufacturing & 3D Innovations. Dr. Bob Tryon, VEXTEC’s Chief Technology Officer, will be presenting on “Computational Tools to Accelerate Manufacturing Development” on Wednesday, October 28 from 2:45 PM – 3:15 [...]
The average metal part requires a lengthy series of “normal” and “special” processing steps. Materials must go through machining or casting to take on their shape (normal processes) before potentially undergoing heat treating, chemical milling, non-destructive inspection, shot peening, or coating (special processes). Finally, parts must be certified to [...]
The transformation of additive manufacturing (AM) from the fringe to a proven application has happened in a matter of years. Along the way, the factories deploying the method have also transformed to open up new possibilities for production. At this point, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and the Tier 1 [...]