Professional INSPEX Machinery
LEAVE IT TO THE PROS WORDS: LAURA GRIFFITHS
3 LEFT:
PHOTOCENTRIC’S MAGNA 3D PRINTER FARM
6 BELOW:
FACE SHIELDS 3D PRINTED WITH PHOTOCENTRIC’S LCD TECHNOLOGY
T
he COVID-19 pandemic has proved a divisive one for the additive manufacturing (AM) industry. While some businesses have seen staff reductions and a downturn in sales, there are others who would argue, with a reasonable hesitation, that the pandemic has actually had a positive impact on the adoption and perception of the technology. A recent report by market intelligence company CONTEXT revealed that while almost every category of AM hardware took a dip in sales, the professional 3D printing market, which accounts for machines costing between 2.5K-20K USD, grew by 17% from 2018 to 2019, a trend which has continued in recent months as work from home scenarios invigorated purchases of compact professional systems for remote usage. For UK-based Photocentric, a photopolymer 3D printing specialist whose large-format LCD Screen printers fall just within that Professional sweet spot, the last few months have provided an opportunity to scale-up its high-volume 3D printer farm ambitions fuelled by an order of 7 million protective face shields for the NHS. “We produce everything here, which is one of our big advantages,” Photocentric’s 3D Development Engineer Ed Barlow tells TCT from the farm on an exclusive virtual tour. “While the whole world was shut down for COVID we had the great opportunity, given that we make our own chemicals, […] we formulate our own resins in house with our own chemistry team, we build our own printers with UK stock, […] we had all the bits we required to build this farm behind me and it allowed us to do this in a matter of a few weeks.”
Bringing everything in-house, the company was able to iterate the mask design 23 times, build a farm of over 36 machines (so far), and ramp up manufacturing for 350,000 face shields each week including post-processing and assembly. At the time of writing, the company has surpassed production of 2.5 million face shields for the NHS.
WHAT NOW?
Temporarily switching 3D print capacities over to PPE production is, however, a short-term solution, evidenced in the recent closure of Voodoo Manufacturing’s Brooklyn 3D print farm which had leveraged its desktop FDM machines to assist in the COVID-19 fight. For other users who purchased professional machines as a result of COVID, whether prompted by work from home scenarios or similar PPE manufacturing efforts, the next challenge is how to repurpose that technology going forward. In a recent panel hosted by MakerBot, CEO Nadav Goshen suggested that companies are now being encouraged to challenge their supply chain legacies, heavily impacted by the pandemic, with additive alternatives, and according to CONTEXT’s Chris Connery, the demand for professional systems is expected to remain. “Difficult economies and a lot of the key industries that 3D printing currently caters to still have some difficulty ahead,” Connery explained. “Once we get past
all that we do believe that this install base of professional machines, this next generation of engineers who are sequestered at home are going to be the management and CEOs of the next generation and they would have become familiar with additive manufacturing.” For Photocentric, the success of the Magna farm has been a proof point for 3D printing’s potential in mass manufacturing and what Barlow says will be “many more Magna farms in many different industries going forward.” “Coronavirus has given us a means to rapidly scale up what we we've always intended to do, which is custom mass manufacture. This Magna farm is the first of many. It's something that we are rolling out as a company strategy going forward, much bigger production lines with 3D printing at its heart.” Some of those other industries are already starting to materialise. Photocentric recently mobilised a new research group for the lowcost mass manufacture of battery electrodes which exploit 3D printing’s geometric freedom. While this specific venture isn’t a direct result of its COVID activity, it exemplifies the flexibility of professional AM systems in a diverse range of manufacturing scenarios. Barlow adds: “What we've managed to do is scale and build a long-lasting model that's competitive with many of these technologies going forward, not just in the short scale of the Coronavirus challenge.”
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