Future Days recap: Ian Gibson on additive manufacturing

At our Future Days Additive Manufacturing event, we were delighted to welcome Professor Ian Gibson from the University of Twente, a renowned expert who has been instrumental in the technology’s development. Ian discusses current challenges, what the future holds for AM, and why effective quality assurance remains pivotal as the field continues to evolve.

Thank you for joining us, Ian. Can you tell us a bit about yourself and your work in additive manufacturing (AM)?

I’ve been involved with additive manufacturing since 1992, when I joined the first AM research group in the UK at the University of Nottingham. We called it ‘rapid prototyping’ at the time, but I immediately saw its exciting potential in industry.

Today, our innovation platform works to bring research into industry, especially by working with small- to medium-sized companies and helping them to innovate and develop their AM processes.

What are the challenges companies face in scaling up for industry?

Both machines and materials are becoming cheaper, but costs per part still need to drop significantly for AM to overtake traditional manufacturing. We’re not there yet, but we’re getting closer every day. But with increasing volumes comes the question of quality. How can we ensure that the parts we’re fabricating at scale are consistently high quality? It’s essential that we ensure scaling up the tech doesn’t mean lower quality, and there’s still room for improvement in quality right now.

How can materials analysis help with these challenges?

Understanding the materials we’re using is essential. We need to be able to monitor the physical characteristics of our materials, like their purity, particle size and shape distribution, and crystallographic and polymeric structure. This helps us to ensure consistent quality in the products. Solutions like X-ray diffraction (XRD) and X-ray fluorescence (XRF) are especially useful for this.

Polymers are a good example. When you elevate their temperature, they oxidize and degrade, becoming brittle – or perhaps changing color. AM operates at higher sustained temperatures than traditional manufacturing, so this is more of a problem than before. So, it’s now important to develop materials that are more resistant and can be worked at higher temperatures for longer. And it gets even more complicated when you factor in combining more than one material!

Where two materials join, there can often be an incompatibility between them. This raises many questions. How should this work within a single machine?  And is it possible for us to treat those materials so that they become more compatible? What about integrating other treatment processes into the AM machine – for example, making metal parts harder or more resistant to chemicals as part of the manufacturing process, rather than afterwards?

These are all important questions, and they shine a light on why we're still looking for many more materials for additive manufacturing. They also show why it’s so hard to predict product quality, which remains a hot topic.

That’s why companies like Malvern Panalytical need to be involved – so that we can understand these processes better. It’s important both to develop more suitable materials and characterize our processes, so we can predict product performance. On-line or high-throughput solutions like Insitec , Aeris , and Zetium are all good choices in a busy production environment for carrying out particle sizing , XRD , and XRF .

So, quality control is an important topic?

Quality is always an issue, especially in safety-critical parts. A lot of aerospace companies are using 3D-printing to make highly complex products, and the manufacturers need to maintain very close control of the quality. So, we need to be able to monitor the processes themselves by taking samples of the material and looking at what happens to the powders or stock material.

You might wonder why we test the powders and not the product – but it’s simply not practical to carry out destructive testing on a turbine housing that costs tens or even hundreds of thousands of euros. It’s equally impractical to make another one just for testing! That’s why we rely on our knowledge of the materials using non-destructive analytical methods, which is where Malvern Panalytical can play an important role again. With a fully capable multi-purpose machine like the Empyrean , we can get very rich data that can tell us a lot about the material’s future performance.

What are you most excited about in the future for AM?

The development of multiple-material additive manufacturing, which we mentioned earlier, is a very exciting area right now. It’s all about creating products which include different material properties, enabling multi-functionality or enhanced functionality.

This is being called ‘4D-printing’ because it incorporates transformation properties in the part itself. This category also includes bio- and food-printing – think about food products made from printed animal tissue, or biocompatible materials that can be used in the medical industry for humans. Of course, this is an area of rapid innovation, so there are many more questions to answer as we look toward the future.

Overall, it’s very exciting that the industries likely to benefit the most are those not currently using AM. As costs go down, AM will start to become competitive with traditional mass production, and this will bring benefits for everyone – not only manufacturers, but also consumers and the planet, as AM reduces waste.

The evolution of AM has always been a very interesting journey. Every time we think we’ve answered our questions, we discover something new. Ultimately, the AM of the future probably won’t look the same as today – but it will certainly be exciting to watch!