Scott Crump and commercialized by his company Stratasys, which marketed its first FDM machine in 1992. The technology used by most 3D printers to date-especially hobbyist and consumer-oriented models-is fused deposition modeling, a special application of plastic extrusion, developed in 1988 by S. Hull's contribution was the STL (Stereolithography) file format and the digital slicing and infill strategies common to many processes today. Hull defined the process as a "system for generating three-dimensional objects by creating a cross-sectional pattern of the object to be formed,". Three weeks later in 1984, Chuck Hull of 3D Systems Corporation filed his own patent for a stereolithography fabrication system, in which layers are added by curing photopolymers with ultraviolet light lasers. The claimed reason was "for lack of business perspective". The application of the French inventors was abandoned by the French General Electric Company (now Alcatel-Alsthom) and CILAS (The Laser Consortium). On JAlain Le Méhauté, Olivier de Witte, and Jean Claude André filed their patent for the stereolithography process. In 1981, Hideo Kodama of Nagoya Municipal Industrial Research Institute invented two additive methods for fabricating three-dimensional plastic models with photo-hardening thermoset polymer, where the UV exposure area is controlled by a mask pattern or a scanning fiber transmitter. Agile tooling uses a cost effective and high quality method to quickly respond to customer and market needs, and it can be used in hydro-forming, stamping, injection molding and other manufacturing processes.Įarly additive manufacturing equipment and materials were developed in the 1980s. Agile tooling is the use of modular means to design tooling that is produced by additive manufacturing or 3D printing methods, to enable quick prototyping and responses to tooling and fixture needs. Today, the term subtractive has not replaced the term machining, instead complementing it when a term that covers any removal method is needed.
That such application of the adjectives rapid and on-demand to the noun manufacturing was novel in the 2000s reveals the prevailing mental model of the long industrial era in which almost all production manufacturing involved long lead times for laborious tooling development. Other terms that have been used as AM synonyms or hypernyms have included desktop manufacturing, rapid manufacturing (as the logical production-level successor to rapid prototyping), and on-demand manufacturing (which echoes on-demand printing in the 2D sense of printing).
Peter Zelinski, the editor-in-chief of Additive Manufacturing magazine, pointed out in 2017 that the terms are still often synonymous in casual usage but that some manufacturing industry experts are increasingly making a sense distinction whereby AM comprises 3D printing plus other technologies or other aspects of a manufacturing process. Both terms reflect that the technologies share the theme of sequential-layer material addition or joining throughout a 3D work envelope under automated control.
Until recently, the term 3D printing has been associated with machines low-end in price or in capability. The term 3D printing still referred only to the polymer technologies in most minds, and the term AM was likelier to be used in metalworking and end use part production contexts than among polymer, inkjet, or stereolithography enthusiasts.īy the early 2010s, the terms 3D printing and additive manufacturing evolved senses in which they were alternate umbrella terms for AM technologies, one being used in popular vernacular by consumer-maker communities and the media, and the other used more formally by industrial AM end-use part producers, AM machine manufacturers, and global technical standards organizations. The umbrella term additive manufacturing (AM) gained wide currency in the 2000s The term subtractive manufacturing appeared as a retronym for the large family of machining processes with metal removal as their common theme.