4D Printing as an Innovative Technology for Creating Agile, Shape Morphing Products Meeting Individual User Needs
4D Printing as an Innovative Technology for Creating Agile, Shape Morphing Products Meeting Individual User Needs

Summary/Abstract: 3D printing is a quite popular technology, frequently used to create unique threedimensional objects. It has many areas of application: architecture, marketing, art, fashion music, but also marketing and business. In marketing and business, it is mostly used for increasing effectiveness of market research, faster product development, decrease logistics costs, or meet changing, unique customer requirements. Recently we can observe fast development of 3D printing consumables – filaments. Today’s printers can use not only synthetic materials, wood-like materials, resin, rubber, metal, concrete or paper but also new generation of smart materials. As a result of 3D printing development there can be seen a big interest in next printing generation – four-dimensional printing (4D printing). This technique can use a similar hardware as 3D printing but uses special filaments (polymers/hydrogels) so that the printed object can be transformed. Their physical parameters can be changed by adding some energy to the system, and because of that this technology is also called active object printing or shape-morphing systems printing. The aim of the article is to present 4D printing technology, its possibilities of usage and future applications mainly in the area of commerce and logistics. The paper contains brief characteristics of 4D printing technology, description on interesting and promising 4D printing startup projects. At the end of article, the authors present the impact of 4D printing technology on markets and business processes performance.

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