The Influence of Additive Manufacturing in the Textile Industry

Currently, the textile industry represents a big threat to the environment and human health, through the large resource consumption, through the harmful chemicals eliminated in the environment, and through the enormous amounts of waste resulted from both the pre-consumption and post-consumption phases. Moreover, it is a continuous need to bring digitalization in this industry to promote sustainability and resource efficiency. Additive manufacturing or 3D Printing is proposed lately as a solution to all these issues created by the textile industry, thus an emphasis has been placed on this technology to replace traditional textile production technologies. Although it has not yet had considerable success in practice, manufacturing of textiles via 3D printing is still a promising effort, due to the benefits it brings, and thus the research continues. This technology has the ability to build remarkable structures with limitless shapes and size, it can functionally optimize the products right from the start, and most important, the production steps can be skipped, thus allowing to reduce the production time and to bring digitisation closer to this sector. Furthermore, the resource consumption can be reduced, the transport routes can be eliminated as well as the textile waste generated during production. In conclusion, this technology is a totally different way to design which diminishes the effort and can conduct to a strong change in the industry. This paper discusses the advantages of the 3D Printing process for the textile field, the encountered difficulties, and recent developments in terms of materials, technologies, and applications.