Proto Labs : When 3D Printing is the Double-edged Sword that Leads to the ‘Manufacturability Talk’

Let's start with a common conversation I have with my engineering students at Duke:

Me: 'How are you going to make that?'
Engineering student team: '3D printing.'
Me: 'We need to talk…'

At our current point in time in the evolution of additive manufacturing, 3D printing serves as both a blessing and a curse with young engineers; thankfully, Protolabs gets it.

Every fall around 40 students, fresh from undergraduate engineering degrees enter my Advanced Design & Manufacturing class that forms part of the Medical Device Design Certificate in the Duke Biomedical Engineering Master's program. This incoming class is invariably smart, eye-wateringly so in fact, but the majority of the time, incoming students have two giant blind-spots-manufacturing medical devices at scale and manufacturing by any process other than 3D printing.

First, I take them through a simple 'how many of your brilliant new medical doohickey do we need to make in an average year for the U.S. market based on the number of hospitals, cases, and market penetration?' Answer: It's a big number. We then crunch those numbers and determine that this translates into making 75 devices per hour with no lunch; I now have their attention; 'no lunch?!?!?' We noodle a little longer and determine that we would need a string of 3D printers halfway from Durham to Atlanta. My point is made.

Today, 3D printing is not a high-volume manufacturing process and certainly not in the medical device industry where IQOQPQ, a quality management department, and occasionally the FDA walk the halls.

Now my students are baffled, because all they have ever really done is design in slick 3D CAD packages and then 3D print their designs on exciting new platforms. But I just demonstrated that 3D printing won't work, at least not for the next few years until the technology takes another couple of quantum leaps.

Me: 'Ever heard of injection molding?'
Engineering student team: 'Yeeees…' *nervously*
Me: 'We're probably going to need to mold these to hit the numbers and quality.'
Engineering student team: 'Great, let's send our CAD file to an injection molding machine'
Me: 'We need to talk some more…'