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COVID-19: Ivaldi’s Nora Toure on 3D Printing and the Supply Chain

Last year, Nora Toure made a very interesting talk on the impact of 3D printing on the global supply chain. The topic was a prescient one, given the events to come in 2020. In turn, I have interviewed Toure about how the topic has evolved since the COVID-19 pandemic.

It’s been a year since you last gave your talk on how 3D printing will disrupt the global supply chain. Can you give a review of the supply chain and 3D printing between that talk and now?

A lot has happened since then, as far as implementing Ivaldi Group’s distributed manufacturing solution! Since my TEDx talk on disrupting supply chains with additive manufacturing, we’ve delivered the world’s first maritime spare parts on merchant vessels, we continued digitizing, optimizing and reviewing performance of thousands of spare parts, not only in maritime, but also in automotive, construction and mining.

The world’s first 3D-printed scupper plug.

I believe the adoption of additive manufacturing in supply chains optimization will be boosted in the next few months as heavy industries will go back to business and recover from the COVID-19 pandemic. The potential of additive manufacturing goes beyond technical comparison between materials and manufacturing process. Shipping, warehousing,  procurement, CO2 emissions, downtime are all savings that need to be taken into account when comparing current supply chain models to distributed manufacturing enhanced supply chains.

A closer look at the first 3D-printed scupper plug.

We have experienced COVID-19 the world over and it has almost completely changed the way we have been doing things. Have you noticed an impact on 3D printing in the global supply chain, particular as a disruptive technology?

As much as I’d rather COVID-19 wasn’t our new reality, I have to admit I’ve been impressed by our additive manufacturing community. It’s fantastic to see how we’ve organized ourselves in such a short amount of time. What strikes me the most is how fast individuals, but also companies of various sizes organize themselves and build their own supply chains, from designing and testing, producing, sanitizing and getting the PPE to the hospitals.

I see disruption of supply chains on two levels:

  1. Simplification of supply chains, with a more limited number of intermediaries and a collaborative approach in product sourcing and design are leading to efficient supply chains, even when triggered by individuals,

  2. Removing shipping from supply chains and focusing on sending files rather than physical products is not only fastening the entire process and saving on CO2 emissions, it’s also now proven that it’s improving efficiency all over

Interestingly, you are the founder and president of Women in 3D Printing. What role is your organization playing in 3D printing in the global supply chain, if any?

Since we do not provide parts nor any technology service, it was a bit challenging to see how we could contribute in manufacturing [personal protection equipment]. I was involved on a personal level in some local initiatives, but I wanted to keep Wi3DP agnostic because, again, we don’t have a full-time team nor employees we could dedicate to any project.

That being said, being a large community, we get information. So, our contribution has been to provide a directory of those 3D printing responses.

But I have to say, I am impressed with the work our ambassadors have done during this time, as many of them have been involved with local 3D printing responses to COVID-19.

How do you view the impact of 3D printing in the supply chain for developing nations, particularly in Africa?

Wherever supply chains aren’t fully developed and established, I believe there is an opportunity to adopt distributed manufacturing solutions sooner and implement those strategies faster.

Organizations such as 3DAfrica are doing a great job at enabling local businesses adopting 3D printing. This could be taken a step further with corporates adopting the technology as well.

Role of Additive Manufacturing in Supply Chain courtesy of Croftam UK.

What is your financial outlook for 3D printing in the supply chain in the next five years, especially after the effects of COVID-19. Do you see a rise in financial growth for 3D printing services in the supply chain or a drop?

The savings enabled by on-demand distributed manufacturing, enabled by 3D printing services, are so big and are impacting, from a financial point of view, more than unit parts cost comparison. The impact is the entire supply chain—on warehousing, shipping, delivery etc.—that it just makes sense to switch some of the traditionally sourced spare parts to additive manufacturing.

 

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3D Printing News Briefs: December 30, 2018

In this week’s abbreviated 3D Printing News Briefs, we’ve got a story on a new type of 3D printing that makes it easy to 3D print small objects, and a distinguished professor gives a TEDx talk about the importance of interdisciplinary research. Wrapping things up, we’ve got a video about an amazing 3D printed 1/6 scale vehicle model.

Shrinking 3D Printer

A schematic of the Alice in Wonderland image that was etched and shrunk in the 3D shrinking printer. [Image: Ed Boyden et al.]

A team of researchers from MIT, Harvard, and the Pfizer Internal Medicine Research Unit in Cambridge, Massachusetts recently published a paper, titled “3D nanofabrication by volumetric deposition and controlled shrinkage of patterned scaffolds,” in the Science journal about their innovative new method of shrinking 3D printing, which makes it easy to 3D print very small objects. A technique called implosion fabrication 3D prints an object, then shrinks it down to the required size. The shrinking 3D printer can work with different materials, such as quantum dots, metals, and DNA, and can also fabricate complicated shapes like microscopic linked chains as well.

MIT researcher Ed Boyden, one of the co-authors of the paper, developed the shrinking 3D printing method by thinking of reversing a process where brain tissue is expanded so it’s possible to see its finer structure. The team found that they could shrink a structure by about 8,000 times in multiple tests, and proved its viability by etching a structure of Alice in Wonderland and shrinking it down to 50 nanometers from 1 cubic millimeter. The research team believes that their shrinking 3D printers could be used to make small, high resolution optical lenses for driving cars, though the possibilities for this technology are practically endless.

TEDx on Interdisciplinary Research

Distinguished Professor Dietmar W. Hutmacher, the director of the Centre for Regenerative Medicine and the Australian Research Council Training Centre in Additive Biomanufacturing at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT), is an inventor, educator, biomedical engineer, and intellectual property creator, and has been responsible for multiple breakthroughs in bioprinting. He recently gave a talk at a TEDx event about the importance of interdisciplinary research as it applies to regenerative medicine, which works to help patients with damaged tissues due to disease or accident. Prof Hutmacher himself has converted a bone tissue engineering concept all the way from the lab to clinical application involving in vitro experiments, preclinical studies, and clinical trials, and in the TEDx talk discussed how “one walks the talk to orchestrate an interdisciplinary team” where everyone can share knowledge and naturally learn the important required competencies. He presented a patient case of a young father’s long bone defect, where his interdisciplinary research team was made up of clinicians, engineers, material scientists, molecular and cell biologists, polymer chemists, and veterinary surgeons.

“In regenerative medicine there is a great move to introduce interdisciplinarity in the research programs, as well as in the scholarships,” DProf Hutmacher said in the YouTube video. “However, most of the teams are rather doing multidisciplinary research, which does not lead to what we have done in the past moving a bone tissue engineering concept into the clinic.”

To see the rest of DProf Hutmacher’s TEDx talk, check out the video below:

1/6 Scale Model of 1961 Dodge D100

Over the years, we’ve seen some pretty cool 3D printed vehicle models that have been both scaled up and scaled down, but I think this one takes the cake: a highly detailed, 1/6 scale model of a 1961 Dodge D100 truck, created by maker Konstantin Bogdanov. Including filming, the project took him a year to complete, and Bogdanov writes that the YouTube video he created is more of a project diary, though it can also be used as a tutorial.

Using a blueprint of the Dodge, Bogdanov modeled the cab of the truck in Blender and 3D printed it out of polyamide; additional materials used to build the model include aluminum foil, Styrene rods, plywood, artificial leather, and acrylic paint. His 44 minute YouTube video shows some of the modeling work, and then moves on to the nitty gritty details of building all the separate pieces of the truck model, from the doors and fenders to the chassis and grille, and finally assembling everything before painting and weathering the model. Plus, at about the 2:06 minute mark, Bogdanov’s adorable cat makes its first of multiple appearances in the video! If you’re interested in making your own 1/6 scale model of the 1961 Dodge D100 truck, you can download the STL files for both the four motor mount and the tractor wheels. Check out the video for more details.

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