Unlike making products by cutting into or shaping raw materials, 3D printing creates physical objects from digital designs by stacking material in horizontal layers. Known as additive manufacturing, this method has been utilized for the highly customizable, less wasteful fabrication of objects such as industrial parts, clothing, surgical tools, prosthetics, biological tissue, and houses. 3D printing has reduced labor costs, enabled rapid prototyping, and shifted manufacturing roles toward digital design.
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Spritam, an epilepsy medication, had been too large and difficult to swallow, particularly due to its inability to dissolve easily. The new pill was designed with porous layers to enhance its dissolvability, paving the way for future 3D printing of drugs.
Apple Watch Ultra 3 cases are 3D printed entirely from recycled, aerospace-grade titanium powder using lasers to fuse particles. Over 400 metric tons of raw titanium were saved in 2025, with two watches fabricated from the same amount of raw material that would have previously been used to make one.
When swapping between colors or materials in a fused deposition modeling system, a considerable amount of filament is purged from the nozzle before introducing a new filament. Filament extruders can create new filament from purged elements, but the device combines colors and produces filaments of inconsistent diameter.
Although 3D printing has become synonymous with the term, objects can be fabricated without filaments of hot plastic or light-sensitive powders. For example, during sheet lamination, ultrasonic waves—high-frequency vibrations—can join metal sheets by creating molecular bonds through friction.
The total printing time on the Prusa i3 MK2 printer was 12 hours and 32 minutes, with the head alone taking nearly 5 hours to print from layering plastic filament.
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Computed axial lithography involves using light to project 2D computerized tomography, or CT, scans of a figure onto photo-sensitive resin, which solidifies upon exposure. As the images and the cylinder are spun at the same rate, the object is volumetrically fabricated an order of magnitude faster than layer-by-layer methods.
FDA-CERSI Lecture Series hosted by Yale Univ.-Mayo Clinic CERSI lecture on The Rise of Point of Care Manufacturing: The Mayo Clinic Experience
Specific locations in a tank of light-sensitive liquid resin are exposed to projected light, causing them to cure onto a build platform. The resulting cross-section of hardened plastic is moved slightly away from the light source, exposing it to resin once more, and the process repeats to produce successive layers.
Producing rockets cheaply and at scale may require atypical manufacturing processes like those developed by Relativity Space, a 3D-printer of rockets. Relativity hopes to not just compete with, but beat, SpaceX in the race to get the first...
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