By John Dulchinos, President, GKN Additive

John Dulchinos

In the field of 2023 additive manufacturing, we believe efforts in supply chain rebalancing will reflect a reduction in dependence on China and a greater global focus on electric vehicles (EVs) to further stimulate US manufacturing. In 3D printing, the SPAC bubble has popped, and company valuations have fallen, limiting access to capital, and ending the industry’s hype cycle phase. 3D printing continues to have excess printer capacity and remains heavily reliant on prototyping as its primary source of revenue, which is reflective of AM constraints such as limited engineering capacity, high 3D printed part costs, and a lack of robust supply chain solutions.

Looking ahead, we believe the industry’s next phase of growth will be driven by high-value, functional parts production, enabled by innovative designs and robust manufacturing solutions. This shift will be supported by an ecosystem of providers that meet customer quality requirements at scale, cost, and lead time primarily in the medical, aerospace, and automotive industries. The tipping point for the industry will come as the ecosystem matures and there is enough value creation with end-users to justify a switch to additive parts that provide substantial profit. We anticipate customers will increasingly look for financially stable, outsourced manufacturing solution providers that can consolidate and localize the supply chain to deliver assembled parts to spec while conforming to the appropriate industry quality management system(s).

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By Keith Perrin, VP Agile Manufacturing SW, Authentise

Keith Perrin

At Authentise we’ve gathered some of our team’s views about what we can expect for 2023. We feel we’ve a good record of independent innovation for design, engineering and manufacturing… DRM (digital rights management) for manufacturing; IOT manufacturing device connectivity; AI driven engineering design and manufacturing, Cloud based, distributed, agile, engineering process and workflow management are a few of the innovations Authentise is pioneering.

However, basing future predictions on what’s happened in the past, has always been an idea fraught with difficulty. Sure there are trends we can try to extrapolate. However it’s often the unforeseen that causes movements to tip. This, we feel, has certainly been the case over the past year or so.

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By Angel Llavero, the CEO of Meltio

Angel Llavero

“We believe that 2023 will be the year of consolidation among the companies developing the different additive manufacturing technologies in the market. In recent months we have witnessed processes of concentration of companies, workforce reduction, industrial relocations, price increases due to the impact of global inflation and increased production costs due to the uncertainty of the war in Ukraine and the slow supply of raw materials after the hard years of the Covid pandemic.

The global 3D printing industry is continuing to mature. Messy business conditions add complexity and consolidation to an industry moving away from its roots in labs and maker spaces and more into boardrooms and stock exchanges.

At Meltio, we end the year with our sights set on new challenges to remain an indispensable partner that enables industrial local metal parts production at the point of need and cost reductions. Our wire-laser metal 3D printing technology (DED) has become a reliable partner for applications such as material research, prototyping, tooling, final parts, and repairs across various industries, from defense and mining to automotive and consumer goods.
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By Oleg Zykov, CEO, C3D Labs

Oleg Zykov

We can’t talk about predictions for 2023 without mentioning a technology that has been known for a long time. Polygonal modeling is actively penetrating the CAD industry. Traditionally, both in mechanical engineering and architectural and construction CAD-systems a boundary representation is used – B-Rep.

This is the most accurate way to represent geometry. However, more and more models are coming to engineers in the form of mesh and polygonal models. These are data from 3D scanners, generative design results and models from online catalogs. They need to be worked with. All leading geometric kernel developers are working on polygonal modeling tools. We presented the first results of this work at our international virtual conference C3DevCon 2022 in October. If you have both solid and mesh models in your workspace, then you will immediately want to work with them simultaneously. In 2023 we will see the widespread use of hybrid modeling not only in high-end CAD, but in any CAD products.

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By Matt Judge, Vice President, Imaginestics, Vizseek

Matt Judge

In 2023, we see greater demand for mechanical computer-aided design, supported by tools such as visual search.

The fluctuations in the business world since early 2020, plus the current unrest in 2023, where half of the tech companies are hiring and half are cutting staff, make specific growth predictions highly challenging, so we will leave that part blank.

The world went digital in the 1980s. Documents that were once in files, inside filing cabinets, became an organized set of ones and zeros on a hard drive on a desktop, then in the server room. Now, many of those digital documents are in the cloud.

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By, David A. Selliman Director of Sales, CoreTechnologie

David A. Selliman 

The State of the Industry – CAD Interoperability Challenge

You would think after many years of attempts to correct the interoperability challenge, most CAD/CAE/CAM software applications can read their competitive products removing the need to translate CAD models to a neutral format. Yet these reading CADx files fail to bring into the interfaces a solid model or missing elements like PMI (Product Management Information) assemblies and metadata correctly.  PMI is currently replacing the 2D drawing with semantic representation.  Within this paper, you will learn about what the industry is needing to effortlessly share CAD data, known as the digital twin/thread, and its relationship to ISO standards, visualization of large file sizes, and validation.  Most interesting is that the subject of validation is such a wide topic, that I will simplify the solutions that companies around the globe are requesting from SME and interoperability companies like CoreTechnologie. Lastly, I will touch on the fastest-growing industry as it related to 3D printing, known as “additive manufacturing”, and its moving target of what the solutions will look like in the next 12 months.   The importance is the ability to collaborate between OEM, suppliers, and software solutions for downstream applications in the space of CAD, CAE, and CAM.

Barriers to Model-Centric Data Interoperability

• The 2D drawing is still considered the master versus the 3D model by many in industry
• There is a significant learning curve to effectively embed PMI into a 3D CAD model
• Many Application Program Interfaces (APIs) do not adequately support downstream processes due to a lack of PMI
• Major Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) suppliers are concerned with losing market share due to the ease of model transportability with standards-based data exchange
• CAM and CMM markets are distributed across many SMEs

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