[Music] your 3D printer is doing layer by layer lap by laap going around building the structure so as opposed to cutting something away you're actually adding something up I don't think Michelangelo could fathom a 3D printer if you want to have innovation in the United States you're going to have to have Manufacturing in the United States the digital manufacturing accelerates innovation no question right now we need to be creating more machines because the demand is insane we've got to go back to our roots and our roots are manufacturers and [Music] doers it's a simple logical process but it represents a revolution far beyond the wildest dreams of 18th century man Manufacturing in America used to be a loud dirty messy business but this is not your grandfather's Factory we're going to take a look at additive manufacturing what used to be called 3D printing and see what it's going to mean for the American economy for the workforce and for what Supply chains in the future will look like the 3D printing Market is forecast to Triple in size to 44.5 billion between 2022 and 2026 I believe that his economies become less Global and somewhat more local Technologies like this will change the way we think about manufacturing I think we may be about to enter a new golden age of technological investment and Innovation and that's because Legacy Industries like manufacturing transport Logistics Healthcare are all ripe for technological innovation 10 9 t 7 additive is already used in all kinds of industries from art to automotives to Aerospace lift off after all why would you have complex Supply chains if you can make components on site building Precision Parts quickly and reliably layer by layer we start our journey at xometry based outside Washington DC it's a great example of how technology can shake up traditional manufacturing one of the things that always amazes me is how many machines and how few people there are in modern factories we've got all these 3D printing manufacturers in our Marketplace and they're running 24 hours a day literally because these machines are largely automated entrepreneur Randy aler saw a chance to use the long taale of the internet to link buyers to all kinds of manufacturers in a way that hadn't been done before there's all sorts of opportunities for people to to sell their goods via the Internet that wasn't true in manufacturing even in boont toown times when seemingly manufacturing is exploding we always have 20% excess capacity right here in the United States so we can tap into that capacity at any given time the idea was to use the xometry platform to optimize access price and Lead times for customers while also giving manufacturers an opportunity to fill excess capacity there were hundreds of thousands of small manufacturers here in the United States there's over 600,000 and 75% of them have less 20 employees and these are local mom and pop manufacturers that historically have depended completely on their local customers they have limited sales and marketing budgets maybe they have a website maybe not at allometry is primarily an online manufacturing Marketplace and 3D printing is still only a small part of that Marketplace but they do have their own additive facilities in this machine they're making a custom part in polycarbonate for a major automotive company over here a Darth Vader mask tell us a little bit about what's happening in one of the machines in 3D printing you're actually adding up material to produce something so the waste is minimal and it enables you to achieve geometries that aren't possible in traditional manufacturing so in this case you've got a nozzle that's extruding two different kinds of plastic material to produce this part and so a customer has created a 3D CAD file basically electronic schematic of what they want with all the details and the software is interacting with the machine to give the instructions for the nozzle to extrude the plastic in a way to reduce that part you can't imagine that being cut on a traditional machine yeah very different than than the oldfashioned manufacturing you usually think [Music] about there's something else about localized manufacturing and 3D printing in particular it's Nimble Parts can be made fast and Designs can be changed fast in fact the same machine can make all kinds of different parts so this is what you usually consider as a desktop 3D printer so this is something that uh I may have at my own shop at my house you know to to make some parts in this case we're printing pla which is a low temperature material which you really use for rapid prototyping and on zomet tre's platform this is a lowcost quick way to kind of get your shape you remember when you went from film camera to digital camera I can now at low cost and high speeds iterate my design before the product and work out some Kinks very early in that just like you could with a digital camera picking the right shot and moving forward and it allows me to actually not just develop my product faster but develop it better I'm curious how being able to do this speeds up the production cycle and does it allow you to to innovate more quickly absolutely and we're seeing that day after day and I've been in this industry for about 15 years you know 3D print was just something you did it was kind of expensive and now it's part of every single production every single product being developed uh if it's not in the thing it's probably used somewhere in the making of that thing so you can increase diversity more people can do it um cut the supply chain and sort of move fast fail quickly and and innovate absolutely yeah it's an awesome tool manufacturing complex Parts on demand on location cutting out complex International Supply chains so what's the catch why hasn't 3D printing gone more mainstream already well the problem is that there are really big challenges there's the cost of the equipment there's the challenge of integrating existing Manufacturing Systems with these new technologies reliability and also how do you develop a skilled Workforce in the past the reality hasn't lived up to the hype at one point we all thought we'd be making Parts at home but that hasn't happened but the 3D printing industry is growing by around 20% year on-ear and although it's only a small fraction of overall us manufacturing I believe that means there's huge opportunity and there are big rewards too Co and the war in Ukraine underlined the need for Supply chains that are resilient not just [Music] efficient while the chip war with China has put the emphasis on supply chain [Music] security 3D printing technology is incredible it can reduce the parts and Lead Times by as much as 90% slash material cost by 90% and cut energy use in half that all helps lower the cost making Goods here in America everything around us except the food that we grow and and ourselves as manufactured every object that's manufactured has an incredible story so I like to tell my students to think about the Journey of every manufactured object and use that as a vehicle to understand the fundamentals of manufacturing and the implications of manufacturing for our society I wanted to visit MIT in Boston because that's where the story of additive manufacturing really began the technology was developed here nurtured by grants from The Office of Naval Research and the National Science Foundation before being adapted by Private Industry it's the kind of Triple Play between government Academia and Industry that's really held up as a gold standard for public private Partnerships manufacturing is not what it used to be in the United States we've lost millions of jobs and we've lost complete supply chain if take apart any advanced tech product and and look through the complex manufacturing processes used from the semiconductors to the surface finish that shows how process and product Innovation go hand inand and by doing it primarily offshore we're not on face making a a poor decision but we're losing the connection between those two and the more we decouple the process and product Innovation the harder it is for the us as a country or certain companies to stay ahead of the curve so now we're at a critical moment in time where we need to rebuild Advanced Supply chains and also project where the United States can truly be strong in inevitably a global manufacturing economy Professor Hart shows me two of mit's research printers used to develop new metal 3D printing processes yeah so this printer is designed to combine laser powder bed fusion with inkjet printing so we can print components with different composition at different positions in the component it's funded by the department of energy for Wow enabling Next Generation turbine blades for higher efficiency energy conversion but this is more of a prototyping scale because here we're more interested in studying the fundamentals on small pieces of material than making even like finished 3D Parts but this is designed to make a part about this large you were saying that one of the key things is basically controlling for error controlling for problems in each aspect of the part is 3D going to be fundamentally better at that at some point than traditional manufacturing 3D printing we'll have a closed loop so we'll be able to simulate the process and measure the process in situ so we know that what the quality is when we take the part out of the printer and that will let us develop 3D printing processes and different configurations of 3D printers and materials to have different levels of quality for different Industries and applications Professor Hart founded Vulcan forms with with one of his MIT students they produce high value metal components for Aviation defense and medical Industries their machines use lasers to melt and fuse metal powders most companies build and sell 3D printers and put risk upon the customer who wants to adopt the technology that has been successful but in order to bring additive to True production scale we felt we need to build not only the technology but build a vertically integrated manufacturing company so Vulcan forms is a digital manufacturing company that uses additive and other digital Technologies to stitch together a complete value chain this is one of the if not the world's most powerful continuous wave laser system 100,000 watts of of power you know making industrial components here raw materials are shaped assembled finally emerg as finished products in this space just like the old Henry Ford ver Rouge Plant you have materials going in One Direction and finished products going out the other but in this case it's taking days if not hours to have those products churned out and that's because materials are being laid down layer by layer with Cutting Edge Technologies 85 to 90% of an aviation engine can be made as a single part whereas before it might have been made up of dozens or even hundreds of different parts the way that we are setting up our supply chain you have something that is dramatically more efficient while being more resilient the key aim here is the ability to produce Precision Parts reliably at scale like these processor cooling systems components you can't imagine carving something like this out of a block of material it would be an entirely different kind of a process Martin grew up in Germany's industrial rure Valley where school trips took in foundaries and forges linking industry with prosperity but recently us manufacturing Ventures haven't necessarily been seen as a good investment setting up fulcon forms involved many challenges on the additive side we felt yeah that technology is not yet in a place where we can just procure equipment and seamlessly integrate this right there we needed to innovate right we needed to come up with a different architecture you know one that enables us to make uh components reliably at scale right and of course the challenges that I associated with that are our manifold first of all find an investor I literally put two out of five investors to sleep in the meeting that I was pitching our serious seat right I this is not a joke one of them wanted to invest by the way that's that's the best part of of this one of the two that that that fell asleep we didn't take their money finding solutions to climate change will be another driver of innovation we have to decarbonize uh and that will require the growth of manufactur in Industries and new Manufacturing Technologies that will enable the low carbon Technologies of the future so there's many core Manufacturing Technologies we need to develop and scale to then enable the low carbon Technologies to be fielded I'm wearing shoes manufactured by Adidas with a 3D printed midsole you can see the lce structure which is of course enabled by 3D printing this is a 3D printed acetabular cup which is a component of a hip implant uh and it's 3D printed because of this porous structure 3D porous structure that is clinically proven to enable faster healing because of integration with bone cells implants like these are in humans in the multi-million quantities already additive will not make everything in the future won't make close to everything but it will touch the life cycle of nearly every product that's designed and made that can be prototyping tooling Service Parts or volume production of at least some of its components but it's the growth in the materials the hardware the software and the Readiness of Industry to push forward the applications the value creating applications that puts the industry in a position to grow big I'm going to come back to MIT to look more closely at the relationship between manufacturing jobs and Innovation but I also wanted to see additive manufacturing at a different scale not with plastics or metal but with concrete and with building an entire home [Music] like this one in Long Island New York it's a 1500 squ ft 8ft ceilinged home and it took just 80 Print hours to build spread over a few weeks it cost $20,000 to build conventional methods would have taken 150,000 so what's the wait time for a house like this would you say right now we need to be creating more machines and selling more machines so that more Builders can help us out because the demand is insane we get hundreds of emails a day of people asking to 3D print their next house you know it looks basically like a normal house that you would that you would buy anywhere in Long Island Kristen Henry is the chief technology officer at sq4d she says their 3D printed homes can help solve three issues here on Long Island first the lack of affordable housing second the lack of construction workers and third supply chain problems 3D printing we really want to use as a tool in order to help construction workers make their jobs easier faster and create a better product right now on Long Island there's really not enough people in the construction industry in order to keep up with the demand for housing which is why we are seeing a lack of housing available and insufficient new construction really two to four people are all you need on site in order to 3D print a house that's compared to traditional construction where at times you can have 20 30 people on the job site doing various things we need a person to operate the printer itself and someone to manage the mix and what's really nice about concrete as well is it's pretty much available anywhere you can go to your local Home Depot and get cement sand and water and then you're ready to build your house and as a result there are not as many supply chain issues and the overall cost is decreased the 3D printer is really doing the most of the work here which is what's really exciting we created something that is able to be reliably 3D printing a house anytime of day night regardless of the weather wow it's amazing I see what you're saying at the different textures so this is like traditional what you would find in any home this is actually what the material looks like when it's laid down sq4d has only Built three houses so far one of the challenges is proving the technology to local building departments but there are several other companies around the US and around the world that are also trying to scale Up 3D printed housing nsq 4d's business plan is really all about spreading the technology making and selling the printers themselves to construction firms Kristen says the printing equipment costs around $1 million Allin but how does the technology actually work you print a layer and then once that layer has firmed up enough H and is still curing you can stack the next layer and keep going so that all of the layers cure together to create the structure while being firm enough to support the weight of the subsequent layers at sq4d we actually 3D print the footings Foundation walls slab interior and exterior walls XY if I'm deciding I want to live in a house like this can I choose my size of Windows how much Freedom do I have to make something look the way I want the world is your oyster you want a window that's 20 ft wide by all means it might not feel reasonable to do that but you could definitely do something along those lines it almost looks like Play-Doh that you could like squeeze you know and and lay on top of one another it's kind of cool too I I actually like The Irregular you know in in places I find that Charming um it add character to it yeah but you can make it smooth if you want you can make it smooth you just stuckle right over it I understand with wood curving is actually very difficult right very difficult and expensive it takes longer it'sot of extra time it's custom you really don't see curved walls in traditional homes but there there's a lot of different opportunities to do architecturally unique features and as this industry really takes off Architects are going to be able to really dive into 3D printing specific techniques and features that aren't achievable otherwise most us homes are made of wood and christon a Yale graduate with a background in mechanical engineering says concrete 3D homes are also more durable in the face of climate change as well as fire wind water and pests there's lots of areas of the country that now have to worry about natural disasters continually you could pretty much drive a truck into the side of the building and that's going to do a lot more damage to the truck so that the houses are really built to last God I want to buy this house it's not just industry where additive manufacturing is making a difference the factory NYC is a Custom Fabrication Studio making sculptures for experiential marketing retail displays props and artworks 3D printing only makes up about 15% of their business but sculptors Paul Outlaw and Lou hinnen say it's already revolutionized how they work 3D printing for us has been revolutionary in the way that we make threedimensional objects reductive methods were just sort of painstakingly slow you have to start with this giant volumetric block you're always just carving away um all of this material until you can find the sculpture inside that you're trying to that you're trying to excavate 3D printing we could skip the phone we do all the Artistry work in the computer we can download models we can create models we can download and modify models so the possibilities are much much much greater possibilities like creating the statue of Jesus with the face of actor Nick Cage the beauty of 3D printing is that it is all done in the computer so that we're able to to do whatever manipulations we want to do uh as show the renderings to the client and be like this is exactly what you're going to get [Music] computer models are easily modified you can even print 3D scans of real humans she she didn't uh uh cooperate during the scanning so we were only able to get uh we were only able to get screaming a screaming child but this is this is my daughter Elvis Outlaw this Venus demo is a more conventional example we were able to download a model online and modify the model and make that printable within you know 15 20 hours so now we can make something like this Venus to Milo in a week or two uh for you know 8 to 10K whereas before we would have had to carve it for weeks or months and then it would be cost prohibitive it might be 50 or $60,000 the factory has 10 different kinds of printing machines ranging from $800 to $350,000 but with technology changing so rapidly so does the price a machine that was $8,000 3 years ago might be closer to$ 800 today the Venus de Milo was print in their Flagship massit 1800 which can do models that are 6 ft tall right now it's printing a giant wrench if Michelangelo had had a 3D printer what would that have been like I don't think Michelangelo could fathom a 3D printer right I mean as genius as he was I mean I think the subtractive brain and the additive brain are very different ways to think about production of artwork or maybe manufact facturing of anything for your business will 3D be the future uh 3D is going to play a huge part of of what we do yes right now the technology can't accomplish everything that we that we fabricate but it certainly helps in a lot of different areas it's really opening the doors to what we're able to uh offer our clients we can take on projects that we couldn't take on before in timelines that we couldn't do them in before for budgets that we couldn't hit I again to asparagus they're perfect for sword fighting I know exactly it's really inspiring to see artists like these find a way to take their passion and turn it into such a burgeoning business and that brings us back to MIT because additive manufacturing is wrapped up with Innovation both in terms of Art and Manufacturing and Manufacturing is about jobs and wages from my own research in these manufacturing companies in the United States I would say were still far far from the day when either 3D printing or robots are going to be significant factors in fact I'm really interested in how we can get more of this new technology into these plants and because I believe that unless we get new technology into the plants we're not going to be able to improve the quality of the jobs Institute Professor Suzanne berer has been researching globalization and Manufacturing for many years visiting plants in the US Asia and Europe she says that as the US lost manufacturing jobs keeping production costs down was the rational thing to do but there was a catch people in the US at least still like making things and they like making things that involve their hands their brains this is really not the problem the problem has been wages and some reasonable security of employment I see this as basically a low Tech low skill low wage trap that American manufacturing has been stuck in for 30 years and the real question is what kind of manufacturing are we going to have in the US not whether or not we're going to have manufacturing we will but what will it be like I'm certain that in the future there will be more Manufacturing in the US than there is now and we will better understand the importance of manufacturing to our economy and how to trade off the tangible Financial costs and the intangible Financial costs and new technology will allow us to manufacture more efficiently and encode and transfer the knowledge that's needed to manufactur it was in part the pressures of financial markets on manufacturers to get get rid of everything that wasn't n core workers weren't core factories weren't core all that could be sent to China and those companies that got rid of the most workers that got rid of the most Factory space those were those that did best on Wall Street and I think today we're looking at a very different picture we're really seeing that manufacturing first of all it's essential for Innovation if you want to have innovation in the United States you're going to have to have Manufacturing in the United States digital manufacturing accelerates innovation no question that's a lot of buzzwords but the ability to uh move new materials into production faster the ability to digitally qualify a manufacturing process and perhaps a finished part means that organizations can think of a product development cycle that's much faster and more resource efficient the introduction of Technology of new tech technology could be a breakthrough because it will require new skills uh and it will actually make the plants more productive and that will mean that the companies will be able to pay the workers higher higher wages not everything is going to be 3D printed and not all manufacturing is going to become more local even making an iPhone in the US would be difficult unlike China the US won't be putting 300,000 workers on a single production site but my journey through additive manufacturing has made me feel optimistic not only about what's happening in the US in manufacturing but what has the potential to go local in many countries knowledge needs to be made by actual direct contact with the makers in our system and not just spun out of a set of theories about the economy from which we deduce theorems and with certain Technologies such as additive you can get unprecedented flexibility so the same machines can be configured to PR medical implants or components for Rocket engines or semiconductor cooling devices and it's that combination of performance and flexibility that's really differentiating and let's us rethink about how we invest in manufacturing infrastructure not only for certain Industries but across Industries for the ecosystem when there's a physical good that's produced and you can actually see what that's being used for that's invigorating we need more of that I want my kids to celebrate that I I I want them to be makers I'd rather them be makers than them being uh investment bankers and we've got to go back to our roots and our roots are farmers and and manufacturers and doers we've seen how these high-tech manufacturing techniques can be used at industrial scale to make parts and products that you can no longer get in choke pointed Supply chains and how they can be used at a smaller scale to make things of great Beauty and artistic value more cheaply and accessibly than ever before I hope that you've seen in this film how manufacturing and Innovation are linked and how new technologies are transforming Supply chains in past episodes we've explored why cheap isn't always cheap how out sourcing has affected us jobs and why keeping some manufacturing here at home is important for us employment and for communities whether you call it de globalization decoupling or localization the world is changing thanks for watching