Manufacturing in the Era of 4th Industrial Revolution: A World Scientific Reference: Recent Advances in Additive Manufacturing

The era of the fourth industrial revolution is fundamentally transforming the manufacturing landscape. Products are getting increasingly complex and customers expect a higher level of customization and quality. Manufacturing in the Era of 4th Industrial Revolution explores three technologies that are the building blocks of the next-generation advanced manufacturing.

Volume 1 presents recent advances in Additive Manufacturing (AM) and describe how these advances are enabling innovations. Additive Manufacturing has recently become a very popular manufacturing process. The most common form of AM is referred to as "three-dimensional (3D) printing", since the AM machines are similar to conventional two-dimensional (2D) laser or inkjet paper printers but have an extra degree of freedom to translate the print head. In practice, AM also resembles layered manufacturing (LM), in that a part is usually built layer-by-layer. Overall, the revolution of additive manufacturing has led to many opportunities in fabricating complex, customized, and novel products. As the number of printable materials increases and AM processes evolve, manufacturing capabilities for future engineering systems will expand rapidly, resulting in a completely new paradigm for solving a myriad of global problems.