The development of industrial luminaires is often confronted with design and manufacturing challenges that traditional design, tooling, and fabrication methods are not best suited. Additive manufacturing (3D printing) offers a means to implement complex shapes and component customizations that conventional methods cannot easily support. Luminaire designs leverage greater weight saving, thermal management optimization, component reduction, and optical distribution customization when utilizing an additive approach. This enhanced flexibility in product design and deployment better supports high mix, low volume applications that are often too specialized to warrant the investment of production tooling to create an appropriate solution. As digital tools like extended/augmented reality mature and allow more precise definitions of an application environment, additive manufacturing design and production methods become increasingly important in the industrial luminaire market vertical. In this article, we seek to highlight some of the benefits of additive manufacturing in developing and deploying a custom solution to illumination of an industrial space.
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