Additive Manufacturing - Definition:

Additive fabrication refers to a class of manufacturing processes, in which a part is built by adding layers of material upon one another. These processes are different from subtractive processes or consolidation processes. Subtractive processes, such as milling, turning, or drilling, use carefully planned tool movements to cut away material from a workpiece to form the desired part. Consolidation processes, such as casting or molding, use custom designed tooling to solidify material into the desired shape. Additive processes, on the other hand, do not require custom tooling or planned tool movements. Instead, the part is constructed directly from a digital 3D model created through Computer Aided Design (CAD) software. The 3D CAD model is converted into many thin layers and the manufacturing equipment uses this geometric data to build each layer sequentially until the part is completed. Due to this approach, additive fabrication is often referred to as layered manufacturing, direct digital manufacturing, or solid free form fabrication. 

The most common term for additive fabrication is rapid prototyping. The term "rapid" is used because additive processes are performed much faster than conventional manufacturing processes. The fabrication of a single part may only take a couple hours, or can take a few days depending on the part size and the process. However, processes that require custom tooling, such as a mold, to be designed and built may require several weeks. Subtractive processes, such as machining, can offer more comparable production times, but those times can increase substantially for highly complex parts. The term "prototyping" is used because these additive processes were initially used only to fabricate prototypes. However, with the improvement of additive technologies, these processes are becoming increasingly capable of high-volume production manufacturing.

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Posted by Eng. Rami Khalil on Wednesday, April 1, 2015