Additive manufacturing in the Italian goldsmith industry. Adoption and economic impact.

The AM technologies have been spreading during last decades as alternative to the traditional subtractive production processes such as turning, milling, and drilling. These technologies are taking hold in all sectors alongside, improving or replacing traditional production techniques. In the jewelry industry additive manufacturing is beginning to settle as the main prototyping tool and is slowly starting to be used directly for the finished product. In the chapter 1 a general overview of the AM technologies is presented. After a brief outline of the history, the classification of the techniques available according to the material form (liquid, solid or powder) is accompanied with a brief description of the industry and the application fields. Chapter 2 presents an overview of the Italian goldsmith sector with a focus on the three main districts of the peninsula (Valenza, Arezzo, Alessandria). The analysis is supported by reports on the goldsmith sector of Intesa San Paolo and an extraction on AIDA on the first thousand companies per turnover with ATECO code: 321210 - Manufacture of jewellery and precious metal goldsmithery or coated with precious metals. The evolution of production processes in goldsmithing up to additive manufacturing adoption is described in Chapter 3. Starting from the traditional lost wax casting, passing through the usage of 3D printers for prototyping in Direct investment casting up to the Selective Laser Melting that directly prints the finished product. In this chapter is also presented a technical comparison among these three techniques. In chapter 4 the advantages and disadvantages of the adoption of SLM in the goldsmith industry are presented. The lead time, the economic factor and the sustainability are the more important points dealt. Finally, collecting the surveys carried out to the companies of the three main poles for the goldsmith in Italy (Arezzo, Valenza, Vicenza), in chapter 5 an analysis on the adoption of the additive manufacturing inside the Italian goldsmith landscape is presented.