3D Printing & the End of the Circuit Board

By Frank Rovella
3D Printing also known as Additive Manufacturing has been around since the 1980s since then there has been a lot of positive and negative hype depending on your perspective. We’ve all heard the fear-mongering from uninformed media sources touting the end of manufacturing as we know it. Until recently it’s only been the end of rapid prototyping as we know it. However, a number of recent developments may indicate that this is about to change.

In a quiet turn of the century factory turned industrial park northwest of Boston, a small group, of academics and engineers, has developed a system that can 3D print electronics.

In conjunction with Harvard University, Voxel8 has developed a 3D printer and highly conductive silver printer inks that allow the circuit board to be printed in process.

As revolutionary as this sounds we have to remember that this is new technology; the developers at Voxel8 aren’t even sure about the potential applications.  At first glance, it looks more like a proof of concept that a production model. Their initial offering utilizes fused filament fabrication (FFF) technology, an established 3D process that is dependable with good repeatability, but not known for high precision.  From a production standpoint, there are several drawbacks. For example, when changing from standard

thermoplastics to conductive inks the ink cartridge must be manually changed. Voxel8’s conductive inks can print the circuit board, but the operator must still manually place the electronic components.
But all this manual labor doesn’t take the wind out of my sails; think about the level of automation, speed, and precision of modern PCB insertion systems. Then combine that with the very low operating costs of the typical FFF 3D system and it’s not hard to imagine large scale production using this technology in the near future.

Its common knowledge that for 3D printing to make a dent in manufacturing metals have to be firmly in the picture. Enter Selective Laser Melting (SLM), this 3D printing process can create products composed of metals such as aluminum, stainless steel, Titanium, and Cobalt Chrome alloys.

SLM was originally employed to produce prototypes and low volumes of dental applications and medical implants and found some high profile applications with NASA.  However its ability to produce complex geometries, hidden voids, and channels has not been lost on the manufacturing community. Tolerances to ±0.02 mm, surface finishes of 20 μm, with close to 100% density make this a very attractive technology.

General Electric is pretty confident in the technology and has invested over $125 million building the first high volume 3D printing facility in the world.  The plant is designed to manufacture fuel nozzles for GE’s LEAP jet engines; they will be using SLM 3D printing technology with Ceramic Metal Composites (CMC). To get an idea of the scale of production, GE currently has orders for more than 6000 LEAP engines, each requires 20 fuel nozzles. As the facility ramps up, GE is expecting production of up to 40,000 SLM printed fuel nozzles by the year 2020.

These developments by themselves may not be cause for alarm, but when taken as a whole they represent a real shift in the way products are manufactured. According to a recent Forbes article, the U.S. 3D printing market grew by 23% from 2009 to 2014 and is expected to continue with growth of 16% from 2015 to 2019.

Though it’s doubtful that 3D printing will ever totally take the place of processes such as machining and stamping, it is certainly poised to make a profound impact on manufacturing as a whole.