
Today, the term subtractive has not replaced the term machining, instead complementing it when a term that covers any removal method is needed. Such application of the adjectives rapid and on-demand to the noun manufacturing was novel in the 2000s reveals the prevailing mental model of the long industrial era in which almost all production manufacturing involved long lead times for laborious tooling development. Other terms that have been used as synonyms or hypernyms have included desktop manufacturing, rapid manufacturing (as the logical production-level successor to rapid prototyping), and on-demand manufacturing (which echoes on-demand printing in the 2D sense of printing).
Pure silver aircraft inklet plus#
Peter Zelinski, the editor-in-chief of Additive Manufacturing magazine, pointed out in 2017 that the terms are still often synonymous in casual usage, but some manufacturing industry experts are trying to make a distinction whereby additive manufacturing comprises 3D printing plus other technologies or other aspects of a manufacturing process. 3D printing and additive manufacturing reflect that the technologies share the theme of material addition or joining throughout a 3D work envelope under automated control. Until recently, the term 3D printing has been associated with machines low in price or in capability. Inkjets were single nozzle at the start they may now have as many as thousands of nozzles for printing in each pass over a surface.īy the early 2010s, the terms 3D printing and additive manufacturing evolved senses in which they were alternate umbrella terms for additive technologies, one being used in popular language by consumer-maker communities and the media, and the other used more formally by industrial end-use part producers, machine manufacturers, and global technical standards organizations. Continuous Inkjet later evolved to On-Demand or Drop-On-Demand Inkjet. As late as the 1970s the term recorder was associated with inkjet. The earliest inkjets were used as recorders and not printers. Inkjet was the least familiar technology even though it was invented in 1950 and poorly understood because of its complex nature. The term 3D printing still referred only to the polymer technologies in most minds, and the term AM was more likely to be used in metalworking and end-use part production contexts than among polymer, inkjet, or stereolithography enthusiasts. In contrast, the term subtractive manufacturing appeared as a retronym for the large family of machining processes with material removal as their common process. The umbrella term additive manufacturing (AM) gained popularity in the 2000s, inspired by the theme of material being added together ( in any of various ways).

In the 1980s, 3D printing techniques were considered suitable only for the production of functional or aesthetic prototypes, and a more appropriate term for it at the time was rapid prototyping.


It can be done in a variety of processes in which material is deposited, joined or solidified under computer control, with material being added together (such as plastics, liquids or powder grains being fused), typically layer by layer. 3D printing or additive manufacturing is the construction of a three-dimensional object from a CAD model or a digital 3D model.
