PARTS THE PLAY

Meet the metal AM firms bringing proprietary technologies to market through parts as a service o erings.

since 2015. What they are now o ering to customers is a technology that delivers up to 100kW of laser power to the powder bed. Importantly, however, this technology is being supplemented with precision machining, industrial automation, a proprietary digital thread, and its in-house engineering expertise. Its facilities therefore encompass know-how across AM, heat treatment, cleaning, surface engineering, precision machining, coatings, and inspection.

Things are looking exciting,” is the conclusion reached after a near ten-minute monologue tackles the question: “What’s been going on since we last spoke… six months ago?”

At Seurat Technologies, there has been a lot to catch up on. But co-founder and CEO James DeMuth duly obliges, detailing the work being put in to define material parameters, build out production plants and fulfil orders for its customers. All this before we come to the reason TCT has grabbed 30 minutes of his time on a busy Thursday morning.

Why is Seurat bringing its proprietary metal 3D printing technology to market by selling parts rather than machines? And why are the likes of Fabric8Labs, VulcanForms and Freeform doing similar?

The four companies have all come to the attention of the ever-curious additive manufacturing community o the back of steep investment rounds and, to varying degrees, limited detail on how their technologies work. But they have all identified the same opportunities. Namely, localized production at scale, with its customers achieving quicker time to market.

“This business model provides customers with greater speed to market because we derive the process parameters in advance, eliminating iterative development, and ensuring rapid qualification and scaleup,” explains VulcanForms co-founder, President, and CEO Martin C. Feldmann.

VulcanForms is the company leveraging the largest amount of capital, having procured 355 million in venture funding during its latest financing round. Valued at over 1 billion USD, the company is vying to realize metal additive manufacturing at scale by integrating its process into a digital manufacturing system that is said to represent ‘the next generation of advanced manufacturing infrastructure.’

Emerging from an MIT lab headed by Professor John Hart, who also helped to establish Desktop Metal, VulcanForms has been working to improve the throughput and quality of metal laser powder bed fusion technology

“In the bigger picture, one of the greatest opportunities America has is to build a manufacturing ecosystem that leverages advanced technology and automation,” co-founder Hart says. “There is a fundamental shift in the ways manufacturers need to adapt to global supply chain challenges and the increasing demands for product design flexibility. The o shored manufacturing is not coming back in its analog form.”

The onshoring of manufacturing was also noted by Fabric8Labs as a trend it can take advantage of. That said, the Californian outfit sees its reach going far beyond the United States.

Having recently closed a 50 million USD financing round, supplementing a 19.3 million Series A round in July 2021, Fabric8Labs is bringing to market a technology that utilizes electroplating and electrochemistry to form 3D structures. Combining electroplating with proprietary printhead and micro electrode array technology, Fabric8Labs is able to print fully dense 3D metal components, featuring complex geometries and resolutions of 50 microns, from a room temperature water-based feedstock.

The company also claims its Electrochhemical Additive Manufacturing (EAM) process often doesn’t require thermal post-processing steps, with parts ready to ship after rinsing, and that its technology is able to achieve significant greenhouse gas emission reductions compared with other additive processes.

“It’s a totally di erent process than anything that’s out there,” says Ian Winfield, VP of Product and Applications at Fabric8Labs. “Our goal is to scale it up as quickly as possible to preserve a broad set of customers. As we’re looking at that in a way that the process can be e ciently run, in a factory setting, we reached the conclusion that the best way to scale the technology would be for us to stand that up and operate it ourselves. That reduces the option of a customer potentially getting an R&D machine, playing around with it for a couple of years, and then trying to convince their internal stakeholders that they want to scale it up.”

Fabric8Labs has primarily targeted OEMs in its customer acquisition, and in its early stages was encouraged to become a tier one or tier two supplier itself, rather than sell manufacturing equipment into their supply chain. Currently, the company is building on a pilot facility in San Diego, which will service its benchmark customers and demonstrate economies at scale, before opening up a larger US facility in 2024/25.

Seurat too is in the process of building out its manufacturing footprint, with an R&D facility and pilot plant facilitated by a total funding of 79 million USD. In the next month or two, the company expects its first-generation Alpha machine based on its Area Printing technology to come online, with parameter development of Inconel 718 and M300 tool steel ongoing. Stainless steel 316L is already 'dialled in.'

Area Printing utilizes a pulsed infrared laser source and blue light projection to melt material, with optics technology helping to control the cooling rate on a per pixel basis. While this allows Seurat to focus on part quality, it also has a roadmap that will see its machines grow in size, speed, and resolution. While currently capable of 10 features/mm and 3.0kg/hr in a 450 x 450 x 450 mm build volume, by 2025 the aim is to be at 14 features/mm and 30kg/hr in a 1.2 x 1.2 x 1.2m build volume.

Because of these aspirations – and there’s a target of 20 features/mm, 1.7kg/ hr and 9.6 x 9.6 x 9.6m build volume by 2030 – Seurat has also decided to proceed with a business model akin to a contract manufacturer. Should it get to 2030 with machines meeting those specs, DeMuth estimates being able to deliver parts at 25 USD per kilo. And his calculations suggest a machine based on Area Printing would be setting customers back half a billion dollars to buy just one platform.

“There’s not a whole lot of customers who are going to buy a machine that big, but there’s a lot who buy parts at 25 dollars a kilo,” he says. “There’s an opportunity for all those parts in that price range to turn it more like a software company: make it quick, make it agile, make it accessible. Forget about the benefits of additive [for a second]. On a per price basis, that’s an explosion right there. But now you apply additive to it, you can get your new capabilities, your new functionality that was never possible before.”

In February, another metal 3D printing company, Freeform, announced a fund raising of 45 million USD to support its parts as a service o ering. Details beyond taglines such as ‘metal 3D printing simplified’ and ‘softwaredefined autonomous factories’ are so far not forthcoming. But that a fourth company carrying such a business model, and attracting such venture capital investment, has come to market suggests there is more than just a sense of the opportunity for the contract manufacturing of metal printed parts, especially in this economic climate.

“Additive is intrinsically a flexible manufacturing technology, but we understood the need to build integrated production systems ourselves to deliver the necessary quality at scale, and provide engineered solutions to customers,” Feldmann concludes.

“VulcanForms reduces friction and accelerates the adoption of AM by eliminating risk for the end user –no capital investment, no operating expense, and no need to pay for components that do not meet all specifications.”

“The decision was driven by our customers,” Fabric8Labs Founder and CEO Je Herman o ers. “When we talked to them and they saw the potential, we asked them how they would want to use this technology. Do they want to buy a printer and embed it into their factories? In most cases, they said, 'no, what we want is parts.' The quickest path was for us to stand up the manufacturing capability.”

“What’s the rule of thumb? You need three years to become an expert in anything. They need to become experts in the machine, so they feel comfortable moving it to production,” DeMuth adds. “Our [view] is that since we fundamentally have control over what’s in the machine, we have to be the best at operating the machines. We’re teed up to say, ‘just give us more volume, and we’ll print you those parts.’ It lowers the barrier to entry because the customer doesn’t have to buy capital equipment. We take that on for them, and we just give them parts.”

HP and Legor Group SPA first began working together over five years ago, but announced an o cial partnership to develop precious metals for metal jet 3D printing in 2022. Legor specializes in the science of precious metals for the jewelry, fashion, and electroplating industries.

Legor says it is the first company to introduce HP Metal Jet 3D printing technology to the luxury and fashion accessory markets, to enable “e cient and high-quality production”. How Legor o ers this technology to its customers in these markets is through the Legor 3D Metal Hub. The hub is a centre designed to o er the chance to experiment and produce jewelry and fashion accessories from both precious and non-precious metal powders.

Fabio Di Falco, Marketing and Customer Support Manager at Legor told TCT about the development of precious metals for the metal jet technology: “We are already working with stainless steel, but bronze and silver are still under R&D. We are quite close to the final results with these materials.

“We are testing the silver and bronze powders in order to find out the right formulation and get the best results. The most critical part of the process is the last phase, during sintering.

SHOWN: EXAMPLES OF MULTIPLE DIFFERENT PARTS FROM LEGOR

Di Falco also spoke about how HP and Legor came to work together: “At the very beginning five years ago, HP at the time was looking at di erent industries, in particular jewelry and fashion accessories. Legor is a really important player, 40% of the jewels around the world are made with our alloys. So Legor is really a relevant, important player in our industry."

Ramon Pastor, HP’s Global Head and General Manager, Metal Jet, added: "It is exciting to partner with another company that views sustainability as one of the most important pillars of their business. We’re looking forward to continuing our Metal Jet partnership with Legor to champion the adoption of 3D printing technology in new and exciting industries while encouraging the adoption of this innovative technology for new applications.”

Tammy Barras is leading a tour of the Westec Plastics toolmaking facility in Livermore, California.

As President of the company, it falls under Barras' remit to be hospitable to existing and potential customers, opening its doors and walking them through Westec’s manufacturing processes.

But today, she isn’t guiding a customer from one workstation to the next. Instead, it’s a group of co ee-making enthusiasts, who in 2008 set up an annual competition to recognize the best cup of co ee brewed with an AeroPress – a product manufactured with the help of Westec.

Somewhere between the CNC machining workspace and the final finishing area, a co ee fanatic remarks: “This is hard. Harder than making a cup of co ee.”

It is nothing Barras didn’t already know. Her morning co ee might take a couple of minutes to brew; the latest tool being designed and manufactured in Westec’s workshop will take weeks to turnaround, maybe even months.

At the end of 2022, though, the company stumbled across a potential means of reducing those lead times. It was at a trade conference in October that Barras was first introduced to Mantle’s TrueShape technology, which combines CNC machining with 3D printing to manufacture tooling components.

“I was blown away by the quality of the inserts that we saw,” Barras said. “It’s di erent than anything we had seen.”

This summer, Westec will install its first Mantle P-200 printer, accompanied by a F-200 furnace, which is powered by TrueShape. TrueShape deposits a flowable metal paste to build parts layer by layer before heat is applied to ensure the layers are firm enough to be machined with a high-speed cutting tool every few layers. The process repeats to build the entire part, which is then placed into the F-200 to solidify the tool into a dense steel.

TrueShape has been designed to remove many of the steps of a conventional tool making process, saving time and allowing toolmakers to move quicker through product development with their customers. “With 3D printing, so many more fine features can be ‘roughed’ in which eliminates many hours of hard milling and electrical discharge machining (EDM) work,” Travis Meeks, Westec VP of Tooling, explained.

“We’re able to print the most complicated part of the job,” added Barras.

Post-print, a skilled toolmaker will likely have to fix the gates to the printed insert and cavity, take care of the threads and then polish the finer details of the part. But with the machining and EDM of the component largely cut out with TrueShape, Westec is expecting 75% of toolmaker’s typical workload to be removed, which is good news for its end users as they develop their products. Initially, Westec is targeting TrueShape at its medical customers. One medical diagnostic device has already been developed with a tool made using TrueShape. Another project is ongoing.

“Oftentimes, [our medical customers] have to sample parts that are produced similarly to how they’re going to be used during production,” Barras explained. “We’re able to print an H13 or even a stainless-steel insert that will be a replica of what we would build for a production tool, and we could do that in two weeks instead of 10 or 12. When they’re doing design changes quickly, they take two weeks to design it, but they want their mold in a week. Everybody’s always asking how fast can you do things?”

Westec first used TrueShape in the development of a diagnostic device. Here, changes to the part forced work on the tooling to halt until the new design was validated. The company had been developing an eight-cavity tool, but quickly pivoted to produce a single cavity tool with TrueShape that matched the gating location, parting line, molding parameter and steel number requirements of the production tool to facilitate product iterations. When the design was confirmed, the details and dimensions were transferred to the production tool, allowing manufacturing to commence. For the printed inserts, only ten hours of additional finish work was needed, down from at least 35 hours with a traditionally manufactured counterpart.

Addressing design changes at this pace is not only set to appease the demands of its users, but also allow Westec to get to where it wants to be: production.

“Our business is based on production,” Barras finished. “We’re not necessarily making money on the tooling, it’s the production, and [when] the customer decides on what their product is, we can get into production. The sooner we get up and running, the better for Westec.”