New Opportunities and Challenges for Additive Manufacturing to Produce Biomedical Devices

Additive Manufacturing (AM) technologies permit to build up products with high level of geometrical complex shape and personalized as unique product by implying low cost and quick time production compared with other manufacturing processes. However, AM needs to improve some misalignments such as process parameters set up, materials consolidation, easy to work with technology and reliability with product design to obtain optimal results. Biomedical devices needs are growing up so fast in last years and it is good market where to invest and to create new developments mainly due to personalized products demand. This paper shows some practical studies where AM were applied to fulfill biomedical devices products requirements. Three case studies based on three medical products are analyzed by using several AM technologies to produce the prototype. It can be concluded AM seems to be the solution to reach required products in biomedical market and these technologies shows good opportunities in the near future.