Inside the Ongoing Industrialization of Metal Additive Manufacturing

How do we decide when a technology has gone from emerging to mainstream? If we use NASA’s Technology Readiness Levels, the standard is quite high: it’s a matter of transitioning from observing the basic principles that underpin the technology to getting it flight proven through successful mission operations. Alternatively, we can frame the question in terms of adoption: smartphones have been around since the ‘90s, though they only started to see widespread use with the first iPhone in 2007.
There are innumerable other ways to delineate between up-and-coming and established tech, but by almost any standard, 3D printing is fast approaching the mainstream. The push toward designing for additive manufacturability is early evidence of this. However, additive manufacturing (AM), as it’s more commonly known in industrial contexts, still tends to be contrasted with traditional or conventional (i.e. subtractive) manufacturing techniques. Nevertheless, the gap between them is shrinking.