At present, the requirement for new product development and upgrading of
the existing product have become inevitable in the manufacturing scenario. The
manufacturing sectors are striving hard to sustain in the global market, hence they are
continuously seeking rapid manufacturing technologies for developing new products as
there is a demand for innovative designs with enhanced features. Conventional
manufacturing technologies have certain shortcomings, such as long production times,
and are inherent to material wastage due to the subtractive nature of the processes. To
meet the demand, it is necessary to accelerate the product development process. The
time spent on the design, manufacturing and testing of a product has to be shortened.
To emphasize the part representation (or) to rapidly create a system, the prototyping
part is ‘Rapid Prototyping’ (RP), and the technology is ‘Additive Manufacturing’
(AM); it is also popularly known as ‘3D Printing’. AM is a novel manufacturing
technology as the products are fabricated by adding successive layers of material with
the aid of a computer. A Computer Aided Design (CAD) model is created and exported
as a Standard Triangle Language (STL) file that is readable by an AM machine. There
are many techniques available, which can be categorized according to their raw
material. This chapter comprehensively reviews the AM techniques, the applications
and the various materials used to produce the AM component.
Keywords: 3D printing, Additive manufacturing, Ceramics, Computer-aided
design, Direct energy deposition, Functionally graded materials, Fused deposition
modeling, Laminated object manufacturing, Manufacturing, Metals and alloys,
Nanocomposites, New product, Polymers, Powder bed fusion, Rapid
manufacturing, Rapid prototyping, Selective laser sintering, Solid state sintering,
Stereolithography, Sustainability.