| | | 3-D printing adds new dimension to business innovation
-- but a growing number of companies are giving serious thought to the technology to help get new ideas off the ground.
That's literally off the ground in aircraft maker Boeing's case. Thirty thousand feet in the air, some planes made by Boeing are equipped with air duct components, wiring covers and other small, general parts that have been made via 3-D printing, or, as the process is known in industrial applications, additive manufacturing. The company also uses additive manufacturing with metal to produce prototype parts for form, fit and function tests...
...For these larger titanium structures that constitute the backbone of aircraft, "they generally fall outside of the capacity of additive manufacturing in its current state because they're larger than the equipment that can make them," said David Dietrich, lead engineer for additive manufacturing in metals at Boeing.
"That's our goal through aggressive new machine designs -- to scale to larger applications," he said... |
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