Pentagon’s Plans For 3-D Printers: Mobile Labs, Bomb Sniffers and Prototype Limbs

10-10-2012 • http://www.wired.com, By Robert Beckhusen

The 3-D printer craze has taken off with everyone from hobbyists and amateur gunsmiths to giant corporations. Less known is how the U.S. military has caught the desktop manufacturing bug too, and is designing printable components for bomb detectors and prototype limbs. Even more radical: The Army has even gone so far to deploy a helicopter-borne 3D-printing laboratory to Afghanistan.

All of these experiments are a realization by the Pentagon that the direct digital manufacturing is developing rapidly. For the Army, work with additive manufacturing work been taken up by the Research, Development and Engineering Command and the Army’s Edgewood Chemical Biological Center (ECBC), the Army’s center for research on defending against a toxic attack.