The Material Science of Metal 3D Printing

I was going to write a reply saying that I don't see why we can't use it in many places as long as we understand the parameters of the product, but as so often happens I found an excellent source that actually explains your stance in details.[1] The TL;DR is that there are lots of imperfections in 3D printed parts, which means they typically fail at much lower stresses. It actually includes some pretty good video illustrating this at a microscopic level. That said, there are apparently new techniques being researched and discovered that have promise to increase the quality of 3D printed parts. One way to thing of it is that we have hundreds to thousands of years of experience in material science with forming metals in other manners, and we've just started with additive engineering, so there's a lot of room for improvement. 1: [this video]

Took me a while, but I tracked down the conversation. Turns out it wasn't a research paper, and I wasn't linked to it but found it on my own in researching the discussion I was having[1]. It was an a video about engineering and cost effectiveness of sintering metals and the current downsides, which (at the time) there were attempts to counter by using specific laser patterns, but even with that the fatigue life was lacking compared to other manufacturing methods. This is, of course, four years out of date, and I can't state for certain how accurate the review of the problems that video provided were, but it did a very good job of explaining what caused those problems, so I wasn't left with many questions as to why sintering wasn't as well suited for some situations. That said, I'm not in this industry, I just noticed some relation to a prior conversation I had and the topic is interesting to me. 1: [link] 2: [this video]