What are strategies to increase manufacturing throughput and make bigger or more parts in a certain period of time? What are strategies in this regard can be used based on this very precise but also slow process?

Case:

Modern fabrication relies more and more on so called additive manufacturing (AM) or solid-freeform fabrication (SFF) technologies, and this not only for rapid prototyping (RPT) purposes or small numbers of customized parts (e.g., patient-specific in regenerative medicine). This includes processes such as stereolithography (STL, SL(A)), see Figure below, selective laser sintering (SLS), fused deposition modeling (FDM), (thermal) phase change (ink)jet printing, or three-dimensional printing (3DP). Concerning the mentioned trend towards the increasing application of AM technologies, the field of micro(- and nano)technologies are no exception here. A corresponding technology there is termed two photon polymerization (2PP) lithography, see Figure below. This 3D nano (laser) lithography can be used to fabricate, for example, bionic material structures such as mimetics of surfaces of antireflective moth eyes, iridescent butterfly wings or sticky Gecko feet. It can be also used to fabricate an emerging class of structural materials with characteristics that in the first instance cannot be found in nature. These materials have their properties rather from their highly periodic, crystal lattice-type micro- or nanostructure than from the exact chemical formulation the structures are made of, and are called metamaterials. One example are mechanical metamaterials, which have negative Poissons ratios, with the consequence that when stretched in one direction, these materials expand (also) perpendicular to this direction (even if in this case there are equivalents in nature; for example, some human tissues show a similar behavior). These materials are called auxetic (meta)materials or auxetics.