Navigating the Maze of Additive Manufacturing Technologies

By Daniel Küpper, Dominik Deradjat, Thomas Krüger, and Wilderich Heising

When selecting the best 3D printing technologies, the devil is in the details. Hundreds of combinations of printer technologies and materials exist, each with different advantages in terms of cost, durability, accuracy, and strength.

Companies that want to excel at additive manufacturing (AM) must learn to navigate a dizzying array of 3D printing technologies and materials. A one-size-fits-all approach will not work. But with a strategic approach that weighs the technical and financial trade-offs, manufacturers — and the companies that supply them — can come out the other side of the maze with the right technology for the right application.

The AM Revolution Faces Headwinds

Additive manufacturing involves using 3D printers and materials to turn digital designs into three-dimensional objects, layer by layer. Since the emergence of AM in the 1980s, numerous technologies have enabled 3D printers to use materials that range from metal powders to human tissue.

During the coronavirus pandemic, these technologies have been used to print face shields and masks, and even parts for ventilators, with virtually no lead time. AM has proven particularly useful for creating visual prototypes.

Even though COVID-19 has shrunk the AM market’s size to $10 billion in 2020, BCG expects the market to rebound post-pandemic, with the potential for at least 20% annual growth. But growth won’t be easy over the near-term. Companies must get smart about optimizing AM technologies and materials for the highest value applications. 

Finding a Way Through the Maze

A strategic approach to AM requires a thorough analysis of the trade-offs between cost, quality, speed, size, and other factors. Using BCG’s proprietary approach, companies can compare the most important metal and polymer printing technologies and materials along 11 dimensions.

Companies can also screen a portfolio of parts and evaluate the technical and financial viability of using different AM technologies and materials. As a result, they can quickly identify the most appropriate AM technology for a specific part, including the respective total cost of ownership.

Our approach automates and speeds up calculations of total production costs and thus allows executives to determine the economic viability of a large portfolio of parts and properties in multiple future scenarios. It is flexible and can be easily adapted to specific situations, including the properties of the actual equipment a company uses to print designs. It accounts not only for machine and material costs, but also for labor and potential post-processing costs over the lifetime of a technology.

How to Make the Right Choice

Selecting the right AM technology and materials is by no means easy, but it is absolutely critical for success. Using a simple decision-making framework can help companies make the optimal choice. To make the right decisions, companies can take the following steps.

• Screen your portfolio of parts. Look at the entire portfolio and identify parts where you think additive manufacturing could produce an edge over traditional manufacturing.
• Assess all the available technologies. For each part, determine whether the necessary properties can be achieved by a specific technology.
• Perform an economic assessment. Assess whether making the part using a specific additive manufacturing technology is viable from the perspective of total cost of ownership over the lifetime of a part.

In the following example we show how this framework can be used to choose the right technology and materials to reduce the weight of an aluminium wheel carrier for a Formula One race car. The wheel carrier connects the wheel, brake caliper, drive axle, and suspension and carries significant loads during operation. Through a redesign, we discovered that the part’s weight could be reduced by 25%.

Our additive manufacturing technology assessment shows that the selective laser melting (SLM) technology is the only way to manufacture the part today that meets the full property requirements. Using metal powder-bed fusion technology/SLM, the metal part can be formed by selectively bonding metal powder particles together, layer by layer.

However, binder-jetting 3D-printing technology is also ready for use today, although we expect it requires two to three years for the technology to achieve the full property requirements. Binder jetting builds parts by depositing a binding agent onto a thin layer of powder through inkjet nozzles. If the part’s technical requirements can be altered without sacrificing performance, binder jetting could be a viable and technically feasible option to pursue further.

An economic assessment shows that in this specific application, the total production cost per part would be about 80% lower using binder jetting as opposed to SLM technology. We expect this cost advantage of binder jetting vs. SLM to stay in the future.

Given the large financial benefits of this application, the company needs to decide whether accepting the small technical trade-offs in terms of slightly lower reproducibility and density would be acceptable. Executives also need to consider whether waiting to scale up binder-jetting production makes sense, especially once these technical shortcomings are eventually overcome as the company collaborates with the manufacturer. 

This decision-making process should not be conducted in isolation. Companies must work together with their technology partners to optimize performance. Companies also exist in a complex ecosystem of other companies participating in the market. Companies that supply technologies and materials should also work together with each other to provide joint offerings and do product cross-marketing in cases where their technology alone may not be a perfect fit for every customer.

By carefully considering their needs before choosing a technology, executives can ultimately decide whether printing a part is technically and economically viable. Only then can they make the best choice.