3D Printing Comes of Age
The highlight of this year's International Manufacturing Technology Show (IMTS), held earlier in September at the McCormick Place Convention Center in Chicago, IL, was the electric car produced live during the Show. More than 110,000 people witnessed the representatives from Cincinnati Incorporated—a 115-year-old industrial machine manufacturer from Ohio, Local Motors—a new creative manufacturing Arizona company, and the Manufacturing Demonstration Facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee print the working electric car layer by layer using carbon fiber reinforced polymer composite.
The car was printed using a new Cincinnati Incorporated manufacturing machine called Big Area Additive Manufacturing or BAAM, which can build components 10 times larger and hundreds of times faster than existing techniques and print parts up to eight feet long. This AMO cooperative partnership project demonstrated how 3D printing has moved from being a table-top novelty and used only for prototype builds, to performing on the real factory floor.
Watch the video about the 3D printing demonstration. Learn more about the Advanced Manufacturing Office.