Remember when Captain Picard commanded the replicator on the Enterprise to make a cup of Earl Grey tea?“Well, we can’t make the tea, but we can [print] the cup,” Thoma says.
The concept is simple enough, Thoma says. Conventional manufacturing methods cut components from blocks of material and sometimes weld multiple pieces together. But 3D printing builds an entire piece from the ground up, allowing users to create new materials and design internal structures. Read the full article here.