Most critical aspect of your AM Machine:

What do you think is the most critical aspect of your AM machine that influences adoption?

(a) Optimization via material and cost, as reduction of material cost & and reducing weight in a design. This kind of optimization is often associated with complex part geometry.

(b) Capability to deliver consistent and reliable results with each produced part. Reliability in terms of part quality, dimensional accuracy, surface finish, and mechanical properties plays a vital role in determining the success of AM adoption.

(c) Delivery of a highly complex part at a reasonable cost. The bottom line is that you are competing with traditional, well established, and mature fabrication techniques. The features that your AM machine brings to your customers is the ability to design things previously unobtainable from traditional methods, at a cost that is reasonable to your customer and one that make a fair profit, all while delivering this faster than most all other methods.?

(d) The ability to machine high quality, for example titanium products which would give out a very near net component requiring very minimal post processing.

(e) Small production runs of reduced part count components, the timeline from PO to part will be a selling point. If the customer has a complex design that started with DfAM in mind the precision and repeatability of the machine will be the best attribute.?

Lastly, it's difficult to quantify the most critical design aspect of a machine that influences AM adoption, as that may vary from part-to-part and industry-to-industry.?Typically, we view AM as a "team sport".?Companies that can effectively bring together a range of professions - including materials science, powder manufacturers, data analysts, modelling & simulation, designers, and manufacturing subject matter experts - has the best success with AM.?In this way, the most critical design aspect is often not one thing, but rather ensuring that their team members are working across disciplinary boundaries to leverage AM tools to solve their exact, functional needs without being bound by the constraints of conventional manufacturing processes. However, we can emphasize on amortization cost which is similar to depreciation as another method of calculating the value for business assets over time. Amortization is the practice of spreading an intangible asset's cost over that asset's useful life. Depreciation is the expensing a fixed asset as it is used to reflect its anticipated deterioration, then amortization cost can reflect more than on aspect to show practical measurement for AM machine adoption.