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🏭 The limits of traditional manufacturing
The methods we use to make products reach a higher engineering level every year. Yet the traditional production process, looked at as a whole, still requires a great deal of human work, money and energy. It becomes especially expensive when we want to make small series and bring new solutions to market quickly. Even with maximum automation, a dedicated production line first has to be designed and built for specific types of components. On top of that, production consumes large amounts of energy throughout the product’s life cycle, and we must also count the materials and energy that go into preparing production in the first place.
The weaknesses of this industrial back end become even more visible when we plan to colonise space. It is hard to imagine the earthly model of production working outside our planet.
During the last pandemic, broken supply chains hit us particularly hard. Apart from missing components in factories, it turned out how difficult it is to quickly start up or switch a factory’s production profile. Suddenly there was an urgent need to produce the most essential items locally, such as masks and ventilators. As it turns out, starting up or even retooling a production line requires an enormous amount of engineering, design, organisational and execution work.
To make other products on the same line (if that is possible at all), significant changes are usually needed in the line’s hardware and software. Beyond production itself, there is still the design of the product and of the whole technological process. Despite computer-aided design and manufacturing systems (CAx: Computer Aided Design, Manufacturing, etc.), design still requires a lot of human work.
Is that good or bad? As humanity, we keep improving both production processes and the products themselves, which is fully in line with the idea of human development. I do not condemn this progress at all; I would simply like to consider progress in a slightly different direction. Nor do I deny the scientific and engineering achievements of mankind: without them, at this stage of technical development, we could not even talk about this idea of how manufacturing could evolve.
🖨️ A revolution in manufacturing and 3D printing?
As a mechatronics engineer, I can feel it in my bones: a revolution is coming that will change the level of abstraction of design and production through artificial intelligence and machine learning.
I also expect production technologies completely different from the ones we know today. In a sense, the manufacturing revolution has already begun with 3D printing. Over the centuries, technologies reach the limits of their capabilities and are often replaced by new, “revolutionary” ones. Vacuum-tube computers (and electronics), because of their limitations, were displaced by the far more efficient and compact “silicon” computers, which we are now squeezing to the last drop. Because of their physical performance limits, silicon computers will probably be displaced in turn by quantum computers, far superior in computing power, energy efficiency and perhaps size.
🔁 3D printing as a transition between mass production and creating anything
By design, 3D printing is meant to remove many of the drawbacks described above. The idea is that one device can produce “any” part. However, current technologies have their limits. The 3D printing process itself is an evolution of a well-known engineering standard: design, then production on a device that is itself made with, and relies on, well-known production methods. A printer is the reverse of a machine tool (CNC): the mill removes excess material until the expected part remains, while 3D printing does the opposite. Either way, we are still stuck with painstaking work on successive, very small layers or portions of material.
🔄 A change of paradigm: from right angles to quasi-organic structures
Creating is not simply a faster 3D printer. It is a change of paradigm. We are moving away from right angles, assembly lines and machining, that is, cutting excess material away from a block, towards spatial manufacturing, in the whole volume at once, of the most optimised, quasi-organic structures. The kind that nature knows, such as bone: material only where the forces flow, with no sharp corners where stress builds up.
And in any series: from a single piece to millions, where every piece can be different, including ones fitted personally to a specific person (an implant, a prosthesis, a helmet, a bicycle frame). And still made of metal or composite, not only of plastic or resin.
| Today | Creating |
|---|---|
| right angles, symmetry, perfect circles | quasi-organic structures, optimised like bone |
| an assembly line built for one type of product | any series, from a single piece, including personally fitted |
| machining, or layer by layer | spatial manufacturing, in the whole volume at once |
| metal and composite from a specialised factory | still metal and composite, made locally |
✨ The unreachable ideal of design and production
The goal? The highest, unreachable form of abstraction of the manufacturing process is the word (the thought). Even leaving theology aside, the unreachable ideal of the highest form of abstraction in making things is found, paradoxically, in the very “non-engineering” Bible, where God creates the whole world, with defined functions, by means of the word. Coming back down to earth, the goal is for a human to obtain the most functional and durable product with the least possible work put into design and production. Perhaps artificial intelligence will even be able to anticipate what we need…
Another unreachable goal is to put recycling specialists out of work: a product that freely changes its purpose (form, shape, properties) according to human needs.
There are two main roads to making products at a higher level of abstraction.
🤖 Raising the level of abstraction in programming with artificial intelligence
Practice shows that “artificial intelligence” is a term often overused in production and design applications. Algorithms that predict various scenarios are still not enough. There is still some way to go to a truly complex, abstract process. What I mean is the ability to turn our human instructions into their execution by computers and by the actuators they control (for example, a robot arm). Admittedly, programming languages are slowly raising the level of abstraction: one command hides more and more lines of machine code and operations. What took dozens of lines of code, written by a human, in simpler (lower-level) programming languages is now hidden in a single command. Here is the simplest example of a rising level of abstraction: printing “Hello World” in two different programming languages.
In C:
#include <stdio.h>
int main(void)
{
printf("Hello, world!\n");
return 0;
}In Python:
print("Hello World")⚙️ Automating the design process
Of course, we are still far from a level of programming abstraction where we could describe the desired functions in simple words and the machine would even anticipate our expectations. Yet step by step we are approaching that stage of human development. This revolution will most likely come both from the development of artificial intelligence, raising the level of abstraction of programming and design, and from the development of manufacturing techniques. Topology optimisation will be responsible for the most efficient structure. Artificial intelligence, genetic algorithms and similar methods will drive an accelerated evolution of the solutions used: shapes, choice of materials, processing methods, and so on, while predicting weak points and potential hazards. The goal is a program in which we can quickly state the functional requirements for the final product.
🌊 A revolution in the technology of making anything, as the evolution of 3D printing
Standard 3D printing has many advantages, but also many drawbacks.
Drawbacks of 3D printing to overcome:
- Additivity. In many methods it means limited strength of the material when a load acts across the layers. Metal powder sintering partly solves this. Additivity also often limits production speed and worsens surface quality. Usually the part grows at one point at a time. Speed can be raised by increasing the number of points where material is deposited or processed. But the real revolution will only come with making things truly in three dimensions at once, by processing the material in an “infinite” (and yet finite) number of points simultaneously.
- Strength is usually limited by additivity: it is clearly lower for loads that pull the layers apart. This is especially visible in the most popular method, printing in ABS plastic.
Possible solutions:
- printing in many points and planes at the same time,
- multi-plane printing with a 5-axis table or a multi-axis head, so that the layers interpenetrate,
- reinforcement that runs through the printed layers,
- a probabilistic nature of printing at the micro scale combined with an optimised structure at the macro scale; the probabilistic, blurred nature lets the layers interpenetrate,
- creating objects evenly in “infinitely” many points at once,
- organic printing: directed growth of organic forms as skeletons for metallisation, filling with material, and so on. More about organic 3D printing (creating) in the article Organic creator (in Polish),
- multidimensional chemical transformations initiated by waves, for example electromagnetic waves, allowing rapid material growth in an almost infinite number of points,
- quantum teleportation…
I developed the idea of manufacturing with waves, and of shapes taken from nature, in a later article: The Fifth Industrial Revolution: Nature’s Shapes and Manufacturing with Waves.
Thank you for your attention, dear reader.
Eng. Dominik Stępień