Distributed manufacturing based on print and large data will completely open up the Internet and manufacturing

Now the investment community has focused on projects such as mobile Internet applications, internet finance and smart-wear devices, which appear to be pigs in a number of outlets. Undeniably, in the Internet and traditional industries constantly penetrate into the depth of the present, each of these projects to promote, will change people's life, are an immeasurable blue sea. But the odd thing is that a lot of reserves, when rich in gold, are just flashing in the torrent of time ahead, and then buried by a din and doubt.

This gold mine, which I will elaborate and excavate, is a pig that can really fly--the distributed manufacturing based on the printing and large data. This mode of manufacturing will completely open up the Internet industry and manufacturing, bringing profound social change to mankind.

Controversy under new technology

3D printing technology, is the first design on the computer CAD three-dimensional model, and then 3D printer will be the layer of material stack, the final generation of products. 3D printing technology has many advantages, such as on-demand manufacturing, reducing waste by-products, material combinations, precise entity reproduction and portable manufacturing. These advantages can reduce the manufacturing cost of about 50%, shorten the processing period of 70%, realize the design and manufacturing integration and complex manufacturing.

At present, 3D printing technology has been widely used in national defense industry, aerospace, shipbuilding and other industrial fields, in the construction industry, medical and health, doll toys, apparel, food processing and other civilian-grade industries have just started.

April 2012, the British "economist" published in the article that 3D printing technology is the third industrial revolution, the most iconic tool of production, the technology and other digital manufacturing mode, the combination will promote the third industrial revolution. As for this, the voices of opposition are endless.

The most familiar example of the industry is the "writing theory" of Mr Gou, chairman of the Foxconn Technology Group. The manufacturing giant pointed out sharply that 3D printing is just a gimmick, if it really can subvert the industry, "then my ' Guo ' word is written upside down."

Tcl chairman Li that, about 3D printing is exaggerated, he does not believe that 3D printing technology can make a television set, from which point of view there is no possibility, this is only mythological color.

A milder view is that 3D printing is a complement and an innovation in the existing manufacturing sector, rather than a completely subversive revolution. For example, Sefu Asia Investment fund partner Citis said: "I do not think there will be a revolutionary, storm-like impact on the industry, but will gradually change." Unlike Internet technology and stem cell technology, it profoundly changes the way people live.

Why does the Economist have such a contrast to the views of these experts and scholars?

From the point of view of manufacturing tools, 3D printing technology is only a supplement to the manufacturing industry, there are still some technical shortcomings.

First, the precision is not high enough. In the layers of manufacturing process, although each level will be computer software cut very thin, but at a certain micro-scale, will still form a certain thickness of the level of "step", which is called the step effect.

Second, the printing speed is slow. 3D printing is subject to the "three-square law", that is, with the increase in volume, printing time, the number of materials will be three times to increase. If you want to print two times the original volume of objects, it will take 8 times times the time and cost.

The third is poor mechanical strength. Affected by materials and forming technology, some products have the durability and reliability problems, in the long-term application, fatigue and other aspects are weak. Except for metal 3D printing for aerospace industry and automobile manufacturing industry.

In addition to the main shortcomings mentioned above, the current 3D printing technology still has a few types of materials, expensive materials, machines can not be universal and so on.

Karl Ulrich, a professor at the Wharton School of Business, Carl Urrich in a column published by the Wall Street Journal, "3D printing every unit of material must be stacked." Therefore, the 3D printing speed is very slow. According to Ulrich, an injection molding machine in the factory can produce 100 perfect plastic spoons every 15 seconds, but the most powerful 3D printer can produce only one spoon every 10 minutes, "which reduces productivity by 4,000 times times." "In this view, 3D printing technology in batch manufacturing does not prevail."

3D Printing true subversive power: distributed manufacturing combined with large data

So where is the advantage of 3D printing technology? Why does the Economist think that "3D printing technology is the most iconic production tool of the third industrial Revolution"? Let's take a look at the production of traditional manufacturing and sales model.

Traditional manufacturing and sales model, is in the factory through the assembly line operations, will produce products, and then through the online electric business platform, offline sales channels (wholesalers, retailers) to send products to consumers around the world. The main disadvantages are as follows:

1, in the design phase, there are a large number of waste design works

Manufacturers can not accurately grasp the specific needs of the market, but also because of expensive open mold costs, had to choose from a large number of design works to produce, many excellent design works cannot be achieved through the production of value.

2, in the product production and circulation process, will consume a lot of resources

Before production, the raw material should be transported to the factory through the logistics link; In the production process, mainly take the mold casting and mechanical processing methods, and its modelling capacity is subject to the use of tools, the more complex the shape of the object, the higher the cost of manufacturing; After production, the product needs to be transported to all parts of the country, it will occupy energy, transportation, warehousing, Manpower and many other resources.

3, in the consumer side, the product may not really be the user's favorite

Products produced by traditional manufacturing methods generally have a certain rigid demand, but in the creative, design, but may not be welcomed by users. Users can accept it because there is no more choice. In particular, the user needs personalized customized products, traditional manufacturing methods because of the cause of the difficult reality.

The best way to solve these chronic problems of traditional manufacturing is to set up a designer platform with large data as its support, and combine the advantages of 3D printing "personalized customization" to create distributed manufacturing sites all over the world. The main ideas are as follows:

3D Printing the existing "Slow printing speed, difficult to batch products" problem, can be distributed manufacturing to solve. The concept of distributed, the author of the third Industrial Revolution, Jeremy Rivkin, an American economist, has been reflected in the idea that the third industrial revolution was represented by distributed energy. The author thinks that distributed manufacturing and distributed energy are not contradictory, but one is the production mode of the future industry, the other is the motive force of production.

On the basis of distributed manufacturing, the unit time consumption of product production becomes insignificant, 10,000 distributed manufacturing sites produce single finished products, and 10,000 finished products are manufactured in 1 processing plants with the same capacity. And the former need not warehousing, logistics links.

One of the core problems to be solved is to have a designer platform based on a large design work.

On this platform, anyone who does not have the knowledge of modeling, but as long as the idea of product design, you can communicate with the designer in time to design their own digital model, and then through the 3D printer to achieve, on the other hand, this platform must be able to ensure that the card designers, creativity, Creative thinking can continue to play out. Once these problems are solved, the Internet and manufacturing can be completely opened up. With a perfect designer platform, in the crowd gathered on the Internet, innovative innovative ideas can be achieved; With the printer as a tool for the distribution of distributed manufacturing point, can be around the manufacturing point of the ordinary users to provide personalized products.

How to build these distributed manufacturing points, I think there are three kinds of possibilities.

One is the traditional commodity shop, retail stores, is a distributed manufacturing point, such as stationery stores, lighting shops, jewelry stores, glasses shops, cakes shops and so on, in the present and future, can be combined with 3D printing technology and traditional manufacturing methods, to complete a number of product realization, such as the creative U disk, pen, lampshade and so on;

Second, innovative ability of the "creators", they will be the future of distributed manufacturing point of a branch, they can complete a number of new products to achieve;

Third, with a certain economic strength of enterprises, they can purchase expensive industrial grade 3D printer, can produce a variety of materials, such as auto parts, construction, decoration, clothing, footwear and other products.

This creative design platform and distributed manufacturing approach will create a new d2u (Designer to User) business model. The online designer directly docking with the user, thus eliminating a large number of intermediate links.

The 3D printing product itself, if compared with the large data platform, will produce greater value. So once the formation of a large data platform based on the 3D print distributed manufacturing model, will have a subversive power:

The impact of traditional electrical business. The current mode of operation of the electric business is to facilitate user transactions online, through the logistics of products sold to the user. In the future, distributed manufacturing methods, although not to reach the level of a 3D printer, but people live around the distributed manufacturing point, you can provide the corresponding products nearby. Instead of having to order online, people can select a digital model in a distributed manufacturing point computer and print it out. According to the current United States "every 4 km range of a" 3D printing popularity, in China, a large population of places, distributed manufacturing sites, the radiation range will be greatly shortened. It can be foreseen that the impact of this type of manufacturing, the future role of the electricity will be greatly reduced, can only sell 3D printing technology can not complete the product, and the role of logistics, more reflected in the distribution of 3D printing supplies.

Change the manufacturing model and employment pattern. From the view of political economy, the essence of the existing capitalist production relations is the wage-labor system based on ownership. Capitalists occupy the means of production, including land, plant, machinery and equipment, tools, raw materials and so on, by the workers employed to pay labor. The important significance of distributed manufacturing methods is: Production tools (3D printers) are no longer monopolized by a handful of capitalists, and each individual worker has an enormous capacity to produce industrial products, and will greatly enhance their innovative creative ability, a model that is critical to the traditional industrial production, especially labor-intensive manufacturing, Will greatly enhance the productivity of human society, will change the current industrial structure, and even social structure.

The future and prospect of 3D printing technology

We can imagine that the future clothing store, will be the customer's stature data scanned after the transmission to the cloud database, with the designer's design, the most intimate, the most comfortable results, the product print out. This can be completed in the home clothing design, production mode, worthy of wide attention and thinking.

Of course, the existing 3D printing technology, especially desktop-level technology, can not achieve the degree of omnipotence, but also comply with Moore's Law, I believe that in the next 5-10 years, 3D printing technology will be a huge breakthrough.

In September 2014, the Israeli Tamicare company developed an elastic biodegradable fabric called "Cosyflex", which prints underwear that feels like real fabric. "Cosyflex" uses a new process to create a disposable underwear in 3 seconds. The process can use various types of liquid polymers such as natural latex, silicon, polyurethane, PTFE, and a variety of textile fibres such as cotton, viscose rayon and polyamide, can print all types of clothing, bandages and sportswear.

Scientists at Northeastern University in the United States developed a 3D printer called "Nanoops" in September 2014. Within minutes, nano-structures and circuits (up to 25 nm) can be printed on flexible or hard substrates using conductive, semi conductive or insulating nanomaterials. This means that in the future, the printer can print out the chip directly. Professor Busnaina of Northeastern University is confident that "one or two years" we can see nano-print consumer products appear.

In October 2014, Hewlett-Packard officially launched its newest 3D printing technology: Multi-jet melting (multi-jetfusion), which will print faster than 10 times times the current fastest device. In the case of mass production of 1000 gears, it takes at least 38 hours for these gears to be manufactured using high-quality laser sintering equipment. and using their new multi-nozzle melting technology, it takes only 3 hours to complete.

In terms of industrial layout, now the international two giants, 3Dsystems and Stratasys, they are already building online platforms. Recently Stratasys company spent 100 million U.S. dollars, the acquisition of online designer platform Grabcad. The goal is to complete the integration of the designer platform for the future of distributed manufacturing preparation, of course, this purpose is the author of a conjecture, but the possibility of implementation is very large.

When the precision, speed and printing materials of 3D printing technology are increasing, the existing investment industry will be greatly impacted when the distributed manufacturing mode based on the printing and large data is popularized.

Take Jingdong and Alibaba as examples. Beijing east from 2007 first round of financing 10 million U.S. dollars in the start of the logistics, the country now 36 cities have 86 warehouses, the purpose is to reduce logistics and distribution links, as quickly as possible to deliver the goods to consumers. Alibaba has also announced plans to invest more than 300 billion yuan in the two-year period in 10 to build a logistics network that can support daily sales of 30 billion online and 24 hours across the country.

However, Liu, Ma Yun and some investors, did not see the new production model will change the logistics system. Director of Shanghai branch of the Institute of Computer Technology, CAS Kong Huawei, chief expert of Shanghai Zhangjiang Science and Technology venture capital, believes that 3D printing has the greatest impact on the logistics industry, "because some small things like cups, ornaments, mobile phone casings, auto parts and so on are not low in logistics, especially now with young-dominated online shopping." Then 3D printing will bring people is, can only buy templates, and then save shipping costs and cumbersome to complete their own home products. It may sound improbable, but technology is always moving forward. ”

In the past 5 years, 3D printing has been integrated into the production cycle of aviation, fashion, medical, sports and other industrial fields. And the next step, 3D printing will enter which field? Jones Lang Lesalle, a financial services firm, has shown a graph of information: "The impact of 3D printing on the supply chain", saying that while 3D printing may take 5-10 years to fully function, it is gradually having a far-reaching impact on the supply chain.

The next real outlet, the investing world, are you ready?

(Responsible editor: Mengyishan)