The development of additive manufacturing technology has been more than 30 years, and in the past, the technology has been more used for prototype manufacturing in the product trial production stage, so it has never received widespread attention. But in the last five years, the interest in additive manufacturing technology has increased rapidly, and I think the main reasons include the following:

Changing product design trends have increased the demand for additive manufacturing technologies. In recent years, with the global excess of the overall production capacity of the manufacturing industry, market competition has intensified. In order to gain competitive advantage in the market segment, manufacturing enterprises began to change the traditional "design-manufacturing-sales" model, and adopted the combination of "user participation in design" and "manufacturing service". The key to competition has changed from price to the "total cost of ownership (TCO)" of users. In order to reduce the total cost of ownership, product designs such as lightweight, functional integration and customizable are becoming popular, and additive manufacturing technology happens to be one of the processes that enables such designs.

Second, the maturity of technology promotes the acceptance of enterprises. In October 2018, GE celebrated the 30,000th delivery of its LEAP engine fuel nozzles, produced using an additive manufacturing process. At about the same time, Siemens also announced that fuel nozzles produced by additive manufacturing on one of its SGT700 gas turbines have been operating trouble-free for more than 8,000 hours. In the automotive industry, BMW also officially announced at the end of 2018 that the volume production of the ceiling bracket for its i8 Roadster will be entirely based on additive manufacturing processes. These classic cases fully demonstrate that the maturity of additive manufacturing processes has reached the level of mass production. Third, the continuous decline in costs has further activated market demand. With more and more material suppliers entering the market, competition is becoming increasingly fierce. Over the past five years, market prices for materials used in metal additive manufacturing have fallen by an average of more than 40%, and for individual iron-based materials by more than 70%. At the same time, the increased stability of equipment and processes also allows service providers to develop a number of mass production processes, reduce waste of materials and inert gases, and make full use of equipment capacity. As a result of these factors, the combined cost of additive manufacturing is also falling significantly. Falling costs are beginning to attract more industrial companies to think about the business value of additive manufacturing.

The optimization of the existing process is also one of the key points of the current technology development, including the process optimization design based on virtual simulation. Using virtual simulation software, engineers can optimize placement orientation, rationally design support structures, and try different energy source scanning paths before manufacturing, thereby improving processing quality, increasing efficiency, and reducing costs.