Round-up: What Carl Bass (Autodesk) has to say about the future of 3D printing

The International CES (Consumer Electronics Show) is the hub for technology innovation and exclusive expert insight. This year some kick-ass technological inventions and futuristic ideas were going around: reality computing, wearables, full-colour 3D scanning, drones, etc. While all the new gadgets and concepts are incredibly exciting, what we were mostly interested in was the trends and predictions for 3D printing (what a surprise!).

Carl Bass, chief executive of Autodesk and one of the most influential figures in 3D world, opened the 3D Printing conference at CES with a critical but optimistic keynote. We want to share with you a summary of his most interesting remarks about the future of 3D printing technology.

According to Bass, 3D printer hype is at its peak at the moment, however, there are still a number of factors slowing down the mass adoption of this technology. As Bass put it, the key challenges in the industry are reliability, quality and time. Despite the improvements, the printers are still very unreliable, fail to produce consistently, and also do not have sufficient quality. In addition, the time taking to print something increases three times (cubed) if you are looking to print something twice of size.

Despite this rather sharp intro, Bass believes there is a huge potential in industrial 3D printing, where the most value will be created. According to him, currently CAD (computer-aided design) tools and software do not actually aid much. You have to come up with an idea of a part you are designing, and what the software is doing is not actually“aiding”, but documenting it.

According to him, design is a very iterative process - you design something, then prototype it, look at the properties and then modify something, and then do it again. So it is a serial process rather than parallel, and that is because the CAD tools were designed for the scarce computing resources. Now, this is not an issue anymore. Hence, the process can be different. What Autodesk are working on now is a software where the engineer provides constraints and the computer runs multiple simulations to meet these constraints and produce the required part.

So far these experiments demonstrated that the computer-generated design was stronger, lighter and better performing – except for one important characteristic. It was impossible or very difficult to manufacture using traditional manufacturing methods. And that’s where 3D printing’s value is. Going forward Bass thinks that this will also extend to choosing materials and creating bespoke materials by the computer. Heat exchanger is one of the most outstanding examples: