Brands team up to see how 3D printing can revolutionise repair

When it comes to designing for sustainability, one of the most common and talked about design methodologies for creating repairable products lies in the ability to swap out defective pieces of the design for a new piece, that would go on to extend the overall lifespan of the product.

In practice, however, there are many logistical issue to creating these "spare parts".

Today, it can be difficult for brands and manufacturers to know when and how to deal with spare parts. As products change and are redesigned, the equipment used to make the parts changes too. So a business can’t continue to make spare parts for products produced years ago. One option could be to produce spare parts in bulk, but there’s no way to predict future need, to know which parts to make, how many and how long they will last. What’s more, a brand like IKEA has around 12,000 different types of products, so this approach would require huge amounts of storage space.

Knowing that these logistical issues exist, design technology experts working with 100 platform, HP, Teleplan, IKEA, Philips, and iFixit are researching the viability of using 3D printing to mitigate these logistical challenges of producing and storing spare parts for their products.

Rather than creating and storing a large and complex array of replacement parts for any catalog of products that a brand maintains, they are instead able to digitally host a number of 3D models that can be used whenever the need for this part arises.

Because they’re made using a 3D printer, it doesn’t cost anything to change between an infinite variety of designs, and you could even use a scan or your imagination to design a part you didn’t predict you would need. This method could also take the guesswork out of manufacturing. Rather than making thousands of parts at once, individual items could be printed only when they’re needed.

These prints however, are not without challenges of their own. 3D printing can often be inconsistent, and with a pre-exsisting manufacturing space that often prioritizes reliability, and uniformity, this can have negative implications on the realized implementation of 3-D printed piece.

Anthony’s work also demonstrates how designers can account for inaccuracies in the 3D printing process at the design phase — by tweaking the size, shape, and material of the item — making the printed spare part more reliable. It’s this constant customisation and adaptability that makes 3D printing so useful, but perhaps is also the reason 3D printing as a process doesn’t slot nicely into today’s supply chains, which are geared towards standardisation and efficiency.

However, as is often the case when designing for sustainability, designing with this in mind can mitigate those issues:

“If considered in original product design, we believe 3D printing has the potential to overcome many pitfalls in current sourcing of spare parts”, says John Ortiz, who led the project from HP. Following the project, he has even stronger faith that 3D printing will change the way we make and use products, and is an important part of the circular economy transition. “With this technology, we can address the challenges of long supply lead times for repair parts, minimum order quantities, the costs associated with transportation, logistics, and inventory holding, and ending production runs on spares.

Review

3D printing as a sustainability tool is something I have always had mixed feelings about. In favor of 3D printing, being able to quickly edit and print physical objects is indescribably beneficial for rapid iterations during the design phase, and logistical problem solving in the manufacturing phase. In my time during this capstone project, however, I got to learn more about the 3D printing recycling projects that are happening on campus with Lili Hurst over at the Center for Design and Manufacturing Excellence. This process of taking those 3D objects, and eventually recycling them, proves to be rather difficult. These plastics that 3D printers use varies tremendously, and in the creation of new objects from these recycled products, one large issue is with the materials interaction with the machinery. The prints often failed, as these 3D printers often required slim margins of what could be put through them, and any amount of contamination in the recycled plastic would have its own effects on the quality of the print. This substantial failure rate would then lead to even more recycling that would need to be done to still utilize that product. At the current level of technology that exists with finicky 3D printers, I am cautiously optimistic about 3D printing as a sustainability tool.

Reference

Iles, J. (2021, July 16). Brands team up to see how 3D printing can revolutionise repair. Ellen MacArthur Foundation. https://www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/articles/brands-team-up-to-see-how-3d-printing-can-revolutionise-repair