A PolyJet printer does not commit to one plastic and stay there. It jets multiple photopolymer resins droplet by droplet under UV light, so a single part can shift from rubber-soft to hard as it prints, the way a paint mixer blends two cans into every shade in between.
Sep 22, 2026
Molten thermoplastic flows the moment it clears its melting point. Glass resists a printer for a different reason: its viscosity crosses several orders of magnitude before it counts as printable at all, and two MIT projects have found opposite ways through that window.
Sep 19, 2026
Additive manufacturing lets a company store a spare part as a CAD file instead of a warehoused object, printing it only when a machine breaks down. The economics only favor that trade for a specific slice of a parts catalog, and a recent cost study puts a number on exactly how narrow that slice is.
Sep 16, 2026
3D printing has had a better file format than STL for over a decade. Almost everything downloaded online still arrives in the older one, and the reason has little to do with engineering.
Sep 13, 2026
Additive manufacturing built its sustainability pitch on how little material it wastes while printing. What happens to a part once it's done being useful is a separate question, and the recycling infrastructure built for mono-material waste mostly can't answer it yet.
A twice-monthly newsletter rounding up our latest coverage, from AppliedAM.
AppliedAM accepts research write-ups, case studies, and technical explainers from practitioners across the AM community.
Grad student and AM professional Ayman Ahdy is using rare access to wire laser metal deposition equipment to study bimetallic printing, joining mild steel and stainless steel for cheaper, corrosion-resistant marine parts.
Read nowJun 14, 2026
Graduate student Rebecca Kaaya Nansubuga is developing an open-source 3D-printed orthopedic surgical positioning table, bringing a $200,000 piece of operating room equipment within reach of any facility with a desktop printer.
Aug 30, 2026
The FDA built its first dedicated review pathway for additive manufactured devices in 2017, after more than a hundred 3D-printed implants had already reached patients under general device rules, and the point-of-care question it raised in 2021 is still open.
Aug 28, 2026
Rail operators, navies, and heavy industry are starting to store spare parts as CAD files instead of steel, printing them only when a machine breaks. The economics only work for some parts, but where they work, they upend how a maintenance budget gets spent.
Peer-reviewed findings from AppliedAM's contributors and the wider AM research community.
Market moves, new capacity, and the business side of additive manufacturing.
Real production runs and real lessons from teams using AM at scale.
Explainers and analysis on the technology, economics, and practice of AM.
Sep 2, 2026
Thermal debinding has kept 3D-printed ceramic parts on a 20-to-100-hour timeline for years, because burning off resin too fast cracks the part. A new vacuum-and-graphite-felt process from UT Dallas cuts that to under 30 minutes.
Sep 1, 2026
Cold spray fires metal powder fast enough to fuse on impact alone, letting shops rebuild titanium and aluminum aircraft parts without a heat-affected zone, but proving that impact actually produced a sound bond is still the harder half of the problem.
Sep 1, 2026
A part fresh off an SLA or DLP printer is only 50 to 85 percent polymerized. What post-cure actually does, chemically, to close that gap, and why time alone is the wrong variable to control it with.
Aug 31, 2026
Stereolithography and DLP resins have always cured into permanent, unrecyclable networks. A decade of work on dynamic covalent chemistry is quietly rewriting that assumption, one reversible bond at a time.
Insights · Aug 24, 2026
Insights · Aug 19, 2026
Insights · Aug 13, 2026
Insights · Aug 9, 2026
Insights · Aug 3, 2026
Insights · Jul 27, 2026
Insights · Jul 20, 2026
Insights · Jul 16, 2026
A twice-monthly newsletter rounding up our latest research, industry, case studies, and insights coverage - straight from the AppliedAM editorial team.
