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FROM THE EDITOR SAM DAVIES

This summer, what sustained our web traffic has chipped away at our sanity.

If The Saga was a seven-act play, then all we’re missing is a resolution. It has had everything else, including some last-minute drama.

The first draft of this editor’s letter revelled in the fact that, for a few weeks at least, all had calmed down. After several attempts by long-time competitor 3D Systems and largest shareholder Nano Dimension to acquire Stratasys had fallen flat, it looked as though Stratasys would proceed in merging with Desktop Metal as was originally planned. And though that initial draft had caveated that perhaps those words were written too soon, we didn’t even make it to press before fate was tempted.

In September, 3D Systems lodged another bid to merge with Stratasys, causing Stratasys to immediately terminate discussions with its fellow additive manufacturing (AM) leader. Then, 3D Systems audaciously sent signed merger documents to Stratasys, while urging Stratasys shareholders to vote against the Desktop Metal merger proposal at its EGM on September 28th. Nano Dimension, never one to miss an opportunity to have its say, swiftly made clear it would be voting against the Desktop Metal merger. Should shareholders block the deal, Stratasys would have five working days to accept 3D Systems’ offer before it expires.

This turbulent tale has been the talk of the town for some months now. Akin to Game of Thrones, each of the protagonists has a desire to be

the dominant player, and everybody watching on has a preference, but praise for the writers of this drawnout spectacle is not forthcoming. As we detailed in the first of our new Additive Insight Deep Dives monthly newsletters (which landed in your inbox on Aug 25), whichever thread of this yarn you pull, there’s an ulterior motive. While each player is striving to come out on top, they also need to resist mounting external pressure.

Stratasys moved for Desktop Metal after Nano moved for Stratasys; Desktop Metal's market cap is 80% lower than when it listed in 2020; while Align Technology’s acquisition of Cubicure proved the fragility of 3D Systems’ share value as it dropped to circa 5 USD per share.

This activity comes in the wider context of a volatile post-Covid economy, and the more specific context of the AM market not keeping pace with the expectations of investors. It has sparked a desperate pursuit to become the de facto leader in AM through inorganic growth. While most would agree consolidation might be necessary, there is still so much work to be done before these technologies pay off those who've invested time and money. The Saga seems to have distracted some from that fact.

Now, the period of relative calm has been punctured. But it did allow us to focus our efforts elsewhere as we pieced together this latest issue.

The rest of the magazine, you’ll be glad to hear, is an M&A-free zone.

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08. THE NEXT BIG THING WILL BE REALLY SMALL EOS explains how its Fine Detail Resolution technology is creating big opportunities for EVs.

automotive & rail

10. WHAT DRIVES YOU

Laura Griffiths takes a tour of the Digital Manufacturing Centre’s AM production facility at Silverstone Park.

13. PRO RACER

Oliver Johnson explores Roboze’s 3D printing collaborations with MotoGP teams.

14. DRIVING THE ELECTRIC REVOLUTION

Experts at the MTC discuss AM material and design advancements for next-gen high-performance motors.

17. ON THE RAILS

How Wabtec used SLM Solutions metal 3D printing technology to transform a pantograph manifold.

19. ONE SHAPE, ALL SIZES Sam reports on a trip to 6K Additive’s Pittsburgh facility to learn more about its UniMelt technology.

22. SCIENCE FACT

MATERIALS 19 10

Oli goes diving for space scrap and speaks to the companies working to print with it.

25. AHEAD OF THE GAME

How Carbon’s bioabsorbable 3D printed elastomers are paving the way for future healthcare applications.

RESEARCH & ACADEMIA 26

26. RACE TO SPACE

Oli speaks to the Sheffield University team behind a record-breaking 3D printed liquid rocket engine project.

29. A DOLLAR AND A DREAM Sam speaks to Virginia Tech about the use of AM in a $1.5 million tire retreading project.

SERVICE PROVIDERS 31

31. MAKE ME, CHANGE ME, SORT ME

Sam takes a closer look at 3DPRINTUK’s management order system at its London hub.

DIVERSITY

32. PUSHING FORWARD

Laura speaks to Designability about why accessibility should be imperative for new product design.

34. RISING STAR

Oli meets with the inaugural winner of the TCT Sanjay Mortimer Foundation Rising Star Award.

38. CAN DFAM ENABLE MORE ACCESSIBLE PRODUCT DESIGN? We ask the experts for their thoughts.

The availability of electric vehicles (EV) to the public has been a big change in recent years, but arguably the biggest change in the automotive industry has been the arrival of assisted driving systems, such as lane assist.

Many new players are now entering serial production with vehicles that include these assisted driving systems, and an increasing number of in-car functions are dependent on the radar systems a vehicle uses to visualise its surroundings. A 2023 report from McKinsey stated that by 2035, autonomous driving could create 300-400 billion USD in revenue.

LIDAR and visible light cameras were the original sensors of choice for automotive applications, but over time have proven to be cumbersome, expensive, and weather conditions such as fog can limit their effectiveness.

To overcome these challenges, engineers have turned to radar technology. For automotive applications, a number of different radar sensors are needed, depending on the function they will perform in a vehicle.

THE WAVEGUIDE SOLUTION

The newest radar sensors contain a component called a waveguide which is designed to direct the electromagnetic wave and minimise energy losses. In the earliest days of radar these were large 3D structures, but in the 1950s started to be also produced as 2D circuit boards, which made them much smaller and cost-effective for the applications of the time. The problem with these circuit boards for modern applications is that as frequencies rise above 10Ghz, the propagation losses increase dramatically. Moreover, it is very inefficient to use a 2D

“FDR is enabling innovations in a wide range of industries.”

SHOWN: WAVEGUIDE WITH COMPLEX ROUTING METALISED IN GOLD

EOS on FDR polymer innovation for assisted driving

SHOWN: M. SC. MARK SIPPEL, CEO, GOLDEN DEVICES GMBH

design for an electromagnetic wave you need to direct in 3D space. A new approach had to be found.

FINE DETAIL RESOLUTION TO THE RESCUE

Today, 3D printing, in the form of Fine Detail Resolution (FDR), is allowing engineers create subcentimetre waveguides that support very high frequencies, with a geometry designed to precisely guide electromagnetic waves. FDR's use in automotive is new but the technology is already being used to create components such as electrical connectors, sensor housings and liquid connectors.

FDR is a powder bed fusion process but enables a level of precision, surface quality and durability, that would be impossible with SLS and challenging with SLA 3D printing. Intricate components the size of fingertips can be produced that retain excellent mechanical and thermal properties.

A NEW GOLDEN AGE OF 3D PRINTING

Golden Devices is a company at the cutting edge of FDR technology –completely reimagining waveguide design and manufacture. The startup was formed in 2022 by three colleagues at Frederich-AlexanderUniversität in Germany, after developing a new way to produce passive high-frequency components.

Golden Devices’ waveguides are being assessed for use across the automotive sector due to their

exceptional properties. They fit in the smallest spaces, and have 100x lower propagation losses than the classical 2D circuit board approach. Not only that, but the company has been able to make the FDR approach cost competitive with previous technologies, while reducing the design to serial production cycle from months to days.

Mark Sippel, CEO at Golden Devices, said, “By working in 3D, our models are not constrained by the physical limitations of 2D production techniques. We have complete design freedom within the boundaries of OEM requirements. Our team can move quickly through an iterative design process where we can print, test, redesign and print again. This lowers the design costs and timeline to production, and with no retooling delays, we can quickly reconfigure antennas to meet Tier 1 and OEM needs.”

With a process almost identical to traditional additive manufacturing, Golden Devices can reliably produce individual prototypes or batches of serial products in the 16.5L build volume of its EOS FORMIGA P 110 FDR. This FDR printer has a unique laser with a focus diameter twice as small as SLS technology, just 220μm, which has been achieved in part by switching to carbon monoxide as its gas, rather than CO2. A wall thickness up to 220μm is possible with an accuracy of +/- 40μm. Postprocessing is also cut dramatically; thanks to the small layer thickness there is no visible stair-stepping effect, with parts requiring only cooldown and depowder steps to reach an ultra-smooth surface finish.

Sippel added, “Once printed, the polymer waveguide receives a sacrificial galvanic coating and a final metallic coating of just 2μm in nickel, copper, or gold, to make it conductive. It’s then straight to final testing and delivery. As a business, FDR is helping us to innovate and outperform existing technology, whilst remaining cost competitive.”

Part of the Golden Devices’ success with FDR is the EOS PA11 material. This polymer is bio-based, whilst being chemically and mechanically heat-resistant, with high durability. End products are just as strong, flexible and durable as moulded parts, but can be far more complex

and include functional elements such as hinges or snap-fit connections. These intricate parts can be produced as a single moulded piece with no split blocks. PA11 is also very sustainable, produced entirely from renewable castor beans –unused powder in the build space or removed in post-processing can be reused, adding to the sustainability.

SMALL IS GETTING BIG

FDR is enabling innovations in a wide range of industries from telecommunications to medical devices, and what Golden Devices is achieving with its designs in the automotive sector, gives a clear indication of what is possible. For those already working in AM, your skills are transferable with FDR, and it will open up new opportunities to reimagine components in a way that is sustainable and cost effective for specialist applications and serial production. It’s time to release the shackles that have held back your product innovation. The next big thing will be really small.

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WHAT DRIVES YOU A

bridge displaying a ‘Welcome to Silverstone Park’ banner confirms Google Maps has faithfully led me to my desired location. But it isn’t until I drive underneath and hear the roar of engines whizzing around the track that I realise just how in the famous Silverstone Park I am – and suddenly very self-conscious of the humble Ford Fiesta that got me there.

A dampened hum of rasping exhausts can still be heard from the top floor of the Digital Manufacturing Centre as I wait to meet with the team who have chosen Silverstone as the location for their vision for the future of UK advanced manufacturing. As I sit with a cup of coffee, that hum, you can’t help but feel energised by it.

“This is the heart of it,” says CEO Kieron Salter, gesturing to the team that’s busy speaking with customers and making

design reviews on incoming data before it heads downstairs to the production floor where a suite of additive manufacturing (AM) machines will turn files into final parts.

Salter opened the DMC in 2021 following nearly a decade providing largely polymer 3D printing to major Formula 1 teams through engineering outfit KW Special Projects, which now sits next door. From there, Salter says the DMC was able to “hit the ground running” by working with existing customers before tapping into the high-end automotive sector, which is now paving the way for grander ambitions in aerospace, space and defence.

The first major milestone on this journey was gaining AS9100 Rev D and ISO9001:2015 certification in January this year. The certifications mean the DMC can now directly supply AM parts to certified private and government aerospace, space and defence customers. It is the key, as Kieron describes, that has “opened the doors” to conversations in each of those areas.

“We're hoping now that we'll start to switch on some of those aerospace programmes that will then lead to serious production, which is what we're looking for,” Salter explains. “We don't want to be a prototyping business. We can still make volumes as low as one and they can be for prototyping purposes but the main objective, especially in automotive, is going through the prototype phase into the production of parts that have used the exact same process from prototype right the way through.”

The DMC is currently running a number of major but confidential automotive programmes which Salter says have hundreds of 3D printed part numbers on board. When TCT visited back in April, Nigel Robinson, the DMC’s Chief Operating Officer, shared that the facility has turned close to 1,000 parts into PPAP quality, fully traceable components since it opened.

THE DMC TO YOUR KWSP

Last year the DMC embarked on a partnership with the Satellite Applications Catapult in an effort to expand the UK’s stake in the space industry and help to establish a national space supply chain for advanced manufacturing.

“Serious production is what we're looking for.”

WORDS:

LAURA GRIFFITHS

SHOWN:

DMC AT SILVERSTONE PARK

SHOWN: DMC FEATURES THREE RENISHAW METAL AM MACHINES

But embedding new technologies into established supply chains isn't easy. “The tricky bit is navigating the protocols and the supply chain because as much as there are lots of grand ambitions around using SMEs and a greater level of engagement with SMEs, and additive being a part of the future, they’re still flowing all of that down through the normal Tier 1s," Salter explains. "There are so many different people that we need to negotiate with and make aware of us to make sure that we're part of those deals, but the usual suspects are still filtering through so there's going to be a challenge.”

The DMC’s journey, which began with just one FDM 3D printer at KWSP ten years ago, before graduating to a third within the space of a year, has given the team first-hand experience of the complexities of getting AM parts onto automotive supply chains. This frustration sparked an idea – could they could create their own?

The colocation of the DMC and KWSP facilities is intentional. While each offers a different skillset, they are designed to mutually exist together so that if an engineering project comes into KWSP, it has a ready-made advanced manufacturing supply chain to tap into next door.

“KWSP Special projects as an engineering service provider and a solutions provider can now design with confidence for AM parts, knowing that we have our own supply chain for delivering that,” Salter explains. “We can go to certain customers and say not only can we design the product that we want but we can integrate additive manufacturing for lightweighting or reduction in cost or tooling, and we have a greater level of design authority.”

Salter offers an example of an interior grab handle; a relatively mundane part that the team were able to redesign in two ways; one that’s 60% lighter but maintains a similar geometry to the original, and a second distinctively additive-looking part that shaves another 20% and further improves performance. But being distinctively additive isn’t the goal.

Robinson said: “We don't actually want to tell them that [it’s additive]. We want them just to accept it's a part that's on the car and performing how it should be.”

Another example is a hollowed-out, lightweight 3D printed chassis insert that goes inside the carbon monocoque of a Formula 1 vehicle. It's a complex structure that would be incredibly difficult to machine with the same lighweighting outcomes.

“One of our challenges, and will be for some time, is that most of our customers don't yet know they need to be our customer because they haven't already made that conclusion that they need additive manufacturing as a solution,” Salter says. “The most successful engagements we have are when we get customers that are intrigued. They want to know a bit more about additive and they think it might provide a benefit but they don't yet know how. We pick a couple of case studies and examples from them. We start working with them and asking, how would we redesign it if additive was now in the toolbox?”

A similar mindset has been adopted over the road at KW Special Projects where Salter challenges me to identify the 3D printed parts, admittedtly indistinguishable to the untrained eye, on a 40% scale model of a Formula 1 vehicle. The team has been gradually selecting parts and making design changes to improve aerodynamics, and there is now a smorgasbord of AM parts on board including polymers, metals and larger components made with additive casting.

“Lead time is clearly a benefit. Manufacturing on demand is a benefit. You don't have to commit to a minimum quantity of 2,000 parts,” Salter says. “From a performance point of view, it’s lightweight without making it look

very ‘additive’. You’d be really hard pressed to spot the additive on this car.”

THROUGH THE DOORS

“The whole infrastructure with powder management, validation and verification, is absolutely critical to the confidence levels in additive going forward,” Robinson says of assimilating additive into supply chains. When we go through the doors and take in a bird’s-eye view of the production DMC’s floor, it’s clear the team has taken note.

There are three Renishaw RenAM 500Q systems running titanium, Scalmalloy and alumunium, a result of a decision made early on to dedicate machines to material families. The third system, however, is a RenAM 500Q Flex, which the DMC was asked to be an early beta tester of, and is designed to facilitate quick material changeovers. Alongside them is a suite of polymer machines from 3D Systems and Stratasys including FDM, Selective Absorption Fusion, and DLP technologies. But Salter is keen to emphasise that the DMC is not simply printing parts and claiming 'job done.' The facility has invested in post-processing equipment from DyeMansion, CNC centres, and a dedicated metrology lab to ensure that the sealed packages of fully finished parts I spot stacked on shelves behind these machines, coupled with traceability documentation, are ready to be delivered to end users with the confidence you’d expect from an established manufacturing supply chain.

Having a full suite of AM technologies at its disposal means the DMC and KWSP are ready to respond to the myriad of engineering challenges that come through its doors, whether it’s a cycling project with Team GB or scaling production of an automotive bracket. Still, there are misconceptions to be fought. Many customers who have stepped into the DMC with the notion of 3D printing as purely a prototyping tool in mind have, through education, discovered that AM can offer much more. But there has to be a reason, and whether that’s speed to market, lower cost tooling or lightweight design, the DMC is ensuring its users understand where it makes sense.

“Let's not try and solve a problem that doesn't actually exist,” as Robinson puts it.

To facilitate that, there’s an educational element including a dedicated space where industry organisations or suppliers like Laser Lines (which has supplied the DMC with its Stratasys kit) can provide AM introductions and learning for newcomers. The DMC is also involved in outreach with schools in what it hopes will serve as inspiration for the next generation of engineers. If the young engineers currently operating machines on its shop floor are any indicator, the message is getting through.

When I last spoke to Salter about his mission for the DMC (during a Zoom tour amid the onset of the pandemic), his ambitions went as far as one day planting a DMC flag in space. Space is evidently an exciting prospect for the team, particularly as the UK government is said to be aiming to capture 10% of the sector by 2030. But whether it’s the myriad of Formula 1 components dotted across each site or, the giant wind tunnel that sits inside KWSP, or simply recognising the importance of speed in getting a product to market, on the track or off, it's clear that strong foundation in automotive, that distinctive hum, is driving the DMC to new opportunities.

SHOWN: INSIDE A RENAM 500Q QUAD-LASER SYSTEM

PRO RACER

In August 2023, Roboze announced that it had signed a new agreement with Ducati Corse, the sports division of Ducati Motor Holding Group, to renew its partnership for the 2023 season. Roboze was also selected by the Monster Energy Yamaha MotoGP team in April 2023 to be the partner for the 2023, 2024, and 2025 MotoGP seasons.

The Ducati Lenovo Team, the winner of the 2022 MotoGP World Championship, has a Roboze ARGO 500 3D printer installed in its Borgo Panigale facility, and will have a Plus PRO professional 3D printer in the paddock to allow the team to accelerate its design and production processes, and optimise the performance of its bikes through the lightweighting of components.

Speaking about the benefits Roboze 3D printing is bringing to the MotoGP teams, Davide Schiena, Head of Application Engineering and Customer Success at Roboze told TCT: “The main advantage of our solution is in the material versatility. We are able to provide materials that can allow our customers to get very high performance at high temperatures with a very lightweight material. Especially if you look at carbon fibre-reinforced PEEK, or the carbon fibre-filled nylon, which is named the Carbon PA PRO. We are able to provide the highest stiffness that can be achieved with these kinds of materials. Generally, this kind of technology and these kinds of materials

are mainly used for aerodynamic surfaces, so wings, flaps and things like that, and for parts that are very close to the engine and the exhaust system, so it has to withstand pretty high temperatures without having any kind of deformation or problems.”

The exhaust system on a MotoGP bike can exceed 700 °C according to Schiena, with other parts of the bike reaching temperatures of up to 300 °C. According to Roboze, a key attribute of its technology is the ability to replace metal parts with printed components made of lighter, high-performance materials.

Schiena spoke about how the teams decide which metal or carbon fibre laminate parts will be replaced with 3D printed components: “In the motorsport industry, they tend to optimise every single gram that they can save on a bike or any kind of vehicle. It’s generally more about replacing carbon fibre laminates in these cases, and that’s the reason why we had to fine-tune our technology in order to easily replace a carbon fibre sheet with our carbon PEEK or carbon PA by respecting the same thickness of the components and the same weight. This is where we brainstorm with the engineering teams.”

A printer being used to create components that will operate in high-temperature, high-performance environments needs to be reliable. For end use parts, printing, testing,

validating and then, in the second iteration, getting something different from what you already tested and validated can cause problems. Roboze says it approaches 3D printing by looking at accuracy, repeatability, and process control with super polymers and composites, and tries to pack it all into a reliable industrial grade 3D printer.

Schiena told TCT about the benefits motorsports teams are gaining using its Plus PRO 3D printer, including on the track: “The PRO line is the professional series of printers we provide that are compact devices than can be packed and taken to the tracks all over the world. That’s something that is very valuable for these teams, for Formula 1, MotoGP, Superbike, Formula E, any kind of competition, where the engineering team can listen to the feedback the driver is providing according to the weather condition or the track condition. And they can slightly change the design of some wing, or some flap to make something that is really optimised at the last second on the track.”

Oli Johnson speaks to Davide Schiena, Head of Application Engineering and Customer Success at Roboze, about the company’s 3D printing partnerships with MotoGP teams.

“The main advantage of our solution is in the material versatility.”

SHOWN: THE DUCATI TEAM’S BIKE WITH THE ROBOZE PLUS PRO

DRIVING THE ELECTRIC REVOLUTION

MTC experts on how advances in metal AM materials and design are enabling the next generation of highperformance motors.

Electric Motors: you can already find them powering millions of everyday devices, but the rush to achieve net zero targets are pushing organisations and their supply chains to make dramatic changes. With legislative deadlines looming, including EU and UK requirements for all new cars and vans to be emission-free on the road from 2035, the pressure to introduce competitive products to market will only intensify. This is also becoming increasingly relevant beyond automotive, as electrification influences how we design machines powering our factories, supplying our cities, and even flying above our heads.

But why are electric motor manufacturers crying out for solutions? There are plenty of reasons, but the push to meet targets for increased motor power, lower part sizes and weights, simplified supply chains and reduced assembly times are just some of the issues causing major headaches.

Converting capabilities and skillsets to fully embrace the electric revolution presents a serious challenge, and with industry already fighting over percentage point improvements in motor design, exploration of new manufacturing opportunities will be key. Additive manufacturing (AM) offers a disruptive technology capable of rising to existing challenges, and has the potential to achieve greater optimisation, customisation, and the potential to accelerate time to market.

AM: A NEW OPPORTUNITY?

So, can AM really be used to solve the head scratching dilemmas faced by motor manufacturers? A team from the Manufacturing Technology Centre (MTC)

in Coventry, UK, home of the National Centre for Additive Manufacturing (NCAM), have been looking into three key areas where laser powder bed fusion (PBF-LB) can make the difference.

MAKING PRODUCTION A REALITY

“AM is too slow and expensive” – a phrase all too commonly heard, but one which PBF-LB machine manufacturers are making a thing of the past. Sizes of AM build platforms are skyrocketing as equipment manufacturers introduce multi-laser systems to market. This opens the door to production of larger motors, in greater quantities, at faster build rates. Meanwhile, developments in build simulation and post-processing can aid the shift towards rate capable manufacturing of production ready motor components. All these factors are bringing costs significantly down.

When used as a rapid prototyping technique, AM can enable iteration of new motor designs and configurations, reducing time to market whilst avoiding tooling costs or lengthy supply chain factors. For example, manufacturing of prototype motor windings can take place

“AM has the potential to provide the step change required to meet net zero objectives.”

SHOWN: MTC’S FUTURE ELECTRIC MOTOR SYSTEM (FEMS), WITH ALUMINIUM AEROMET A20X CASING MANUFACTURED BY PBF-LB

WORDS: Chris Dalton & Ollie Hartfield

without the investment and lead time needed for tooling or new machines.

Indirect AM methods, where moulds are 3D printed ready for casting, could also play a role in accelerating the uptake of nextgeneration electric motors. Whilst the design freedoms are not quite as open, the indirect AM process gives access to a wider world of materials and opportunity for using legacy methods of qualification in a higher rate production environment. With all these factors, the business case to onboard AM can suddenly seem more feasible to apprehensive organisations.

MATERIALS FOR THE FUTURE

Traditionally, processes such as PBF-LB have been limited to a small selection of materials, with users often ‘settling’ for inferior properties. However, the past few years have seen an explosion in new material development enabled by the growing maturity of PBF-LB processes. Electric motor manufacturers suddenly have an entire database of materials to choose from and, using AM, can optimise for each of the components within their motors. Due to the rapid solidification rates and small grain sizes of as-built AM parts, mechanical performance can match or even exceed cast equivalents.

For a structural motor component, such as a motor casing, a manufacturer might select one of a growing number of new high strength aluminium alloys unique to AM, with remarkable strength-toweight ratios enabling optimal power densities in the most stressed regions in the motor. However, for the motor’s integral winding components, a more conductive alternative is required. Pure copper, traditionally challenging to process using PBF-LB, is seeing dramatic developments due to the latest in state-of-the-art laser technology and can now be used to replace coils or hairpin windings.

For those more conscious about weight and the earth’s depleting resources, alternatives to pure copper are also available in PBF-LB, with high conductivity aluminium alloys available for manufacturing highly power dense windings, or cooling structures to allow optimised heat flow and higher-temperature motor operation.

DESIGNING THE IMPOSSIBLE

Design is key to unlocking the full potential of additive manufacturing. Previously implausible features can now be implemented with ease, including sub-millimetre wall thicknesses and lattice structures, both instrumental in reducing overall motor weight and increasing power density. Meanwhile, software providers are also developing advanced design tools that enable a greater degree of product optimisation and an automated design workflow. These benefits are vastly compressing development time and enabling engineers to focus on significant functional improvements.

Examples where electric motors are yielding the benefits of these advanced AM design tools are now widespread, in particular focusing on the development of lightweight structures. Highly consolidated assemblies, including complex cooling networks which distribute heat in an optimised sequence have been

demonstrated for electric machines, power electronics, and other mechanical components.

Electrically conductive materials such as copper and aluminium are fundamentally disrupting the status quo in motor winding design. Conductors can now exhibit evolving cross sections which can be shaped to minimise electromagnetic losses, reduce end winding height, and prevent the need for large heat exchangers. The performance benefits can even reduce the energy demand on power systems to achieve significant system-level mass reductions. Regardless of the approach, it is clear that the design freedoms of AM offer a product capability which is yet to be fully realised.

LOOKING TO THE FUTURE

Of course, AM cannot promise to be a miracle cure, with obstacles that still need to be overcome before the technology can be adopted widely for electric motor manufacture. For example, despite advancements in machine sizes, PBF-LB and similar AM processes are still suited to lower manufacturing volumes, and struggle to compete with the achievable rates of casting and forging. Meanwhile, AM’s relative immaturity in some sectors increases the complexity of part qualification, with the question: “How do I prove my AM part is fit for purpose?” proving hard to answer regardless of the industry.

So far, the majority of AM for electric motors has focused on so-called ‘nonactive’ components, such as the housing, which do not form part of the electromagnetic circuit. Although we are seeing exciting developments in AM of copper, with progress in soft magnetics and high silicon content electrical steels following behind, ‘active’ motor elements will need further advancements before we see wide-spread deployment into production electric machines. One of the most exciting areas of development within the AM of motors can be seen in the advancements in copper and aluminium windings. However, as each new possibility in winding geometry is realised, interesting manufacturing and assembly conundrums are raised, with automated, reliable insulation and joining of these complex geometries a key area of focus in the AM community.

As each of these challenges are overcome, and whether using AM directly to manufacture electric motors or indirectly though tooling or rapid prototyping, AM certainly has the potential to provide the step change in development required to meet net zero objectives.

ABOVE: ADDITIVELY WOUND STATOR WITH WINDINGS MANUFACTURED FROM CONSTELLIUM AHEADD CP1 USING PBF-LB

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With a more powerful laser and enhanced scanning speed, the Fuse 1+ 30W delivers parts at up to twice the speed as previous generations, allowing designers, engineers, and manufacturers to go from design to finished part overnight.

WORDS: SAM DAVIES

ON THE RAILS

How Wabtec used SLM Solutions metal 3D printing technology to transform a pantograph manifold.

likely to have parts break and fail, meaning the train could not be used until the component was replaced. Trains have been known to be out of action for weeks should problems arise in the procurement of the replacement component. Though the entire system will have to be replaced if there is an issue with the manifold, Wabtec expects these instances to be less likely now the product has been optimised.

Overhead, a current of electrical energy is on the move. Several tens of tonnes of metal glide through the city, with passengers paying scant attention to the infrastructure getting them from A to B.

Even those curious enough to look beyond the timetable as their train pulls into the station might regard the cables, wiring and pantograph that are transferring electricity from the overhead line into the train, but the manifold that facilitates this transmission, for example, wouldn’t incite much feeling in the average commuter.

But for those working to design, develop and manufacture that component, there’s

an appreciation that this mode of transport can’t happen without it.

Wabtec is among the premier providers of pantographs for rail systems, having installed around 3,000 of its CX Pantograph systems on high-speed trains around the world. Boasting ‘reliability’ and ‘optimal performance’, the pantograph is considered to be the ‘lightest in its market segment’ and encompass a ‘minimal component design’.

Previously, the pantograph manifold has been manufactured out of up to 17 machined blocks with ‘a lot of assembly actions and pieces such as taps, pneumatic connectors’, bringing with it a risk of leakage as well as substantial weight. But with Selective Laser Melting (SLM) 3D printing technology, several improvements were able to be made to the component.

Among the highlights are a part consolidation from 17 pieces down to one, a 75% weight reduction and a ‘drastic’ reduction to its lifecycle cost thanks to the limited risk of leakage. Wabtec also says its additively manufactured manifold is helping pantographs to perform quicker movements compared to the pantograph standard.

The part consolidation of the manifold is bringing benefits in the immediate term through helping to lightweight the component, and as a 17-piece component, the manifold was much more

Wabtec has also reported a positive environmental impact, citing France’s 70% decarbonised electricity source and its in-house additive manufacture of the manifold as key factors – previously, the conventionally manufactured manifold had been manufactured in another region.

This has all added up to another additive manufacturing success story for Wabtec, who has previously publicly discussed its usage of additive manufacturing for pneumatic brake panels. The pantograph manifolds are said to have undergone a ‘rigorous testing process’ which involved static tests, overpressure tests, salt spray tests and sealing tests, as well as endurance assessments.

Wabtec are exploring how to further optimise the manifold to be more compact, while there is a wider focus on ensuring its customers are supported when it comes to part obsolescence. Through supplier bankruptcy, broken tooling, and the discontinuing of the manufacture of some parts, obsolescence is a growing issue that Wabtec believes can be solved with 3D printing technologies.

As such, the company says it is leveraging additive manufacturing to ‘develop the future generation of railway components’ while also placing a focus on the development of new materials.

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ONE SHAPE, ALL SIZES

Frank Roberts walks into bay four, gesticulating at a metal cylinder engulfed in wiring and surrounded by scaffolding. He takes a few steps across the floor and mounts the steps on the right-hand side, all the while detailing the workings of 6K Additive’s UniMelt plasma technology.

The system is currently idle, hence we’re allowed to take a closer look without risk of decontaminating the produce. It is not as big as you might think, nor is the facility as dusty as you might expect. This is the way 6K does things.

“The torch is this very gently moving plume,” the 6K Additive President says of the microwave plasma omitted by the company’s UniMelt technology, “with no violence to it at all. As the particles enter, they’re pretty well behaved as they move down.”

Those particles are moving downwards through the system, but not before they pass through the heat zone where they melt quickly and form a sphere. The length of the plume can be adjusted from 18 inches to eight feet, controlling time and temperature depending on the material being processed. It helps to yield spherical metal powders using less energy than compared to conventional techniques.

6K Additive’s UniMelt process, according to the company, yields metal powders with perfect spherical particles using much less energy. When the company’s staff reference alternative techniques, such as gas atomisation or

plasma atomisation, they use words like ‘bash’ and ‘break’, ‘violent’ and ‘aggressive’ to describe how powders are atomised. What you end up with, per Roberts, is ‘broad particle size distribution (PSD), which is resulting in low yield.’ There’s also the issue of powder porosity caused by the ‘aggressive gas flows.’

6K Additive, whose aim is to provide an alternative to such drawbacks, was born off the back of Amastan Technologies acquiring AL Solutions in 2019, with 6K CEO Aaron Bent having led the former and Roberts the founder of the latter. By the following summer, its first two UniMelt systems had been commissioned to process up to 100 tonnes of nickel super alloys and titanium powders each per year. Capacity was doubled in 2021, and when TCT visited the company’s Pittsburgh site in April, work was ongoing to add six more UniMelt systems and commence operations at its prep powder revert evaluation plant down the road.

At this site, an initial sort is carried out before drums of material are XRF scanned to ensure the correct material, and amount of material, is in the container. After this step, a sample is taken for a more comprehensive evaluation, each drum is put through a screening operation, and then loaded onto pails which are transported over to the production facility. 6K is also adding a fleet of five milling machines to the prep site to enable the sizing of

Materials are sized at standard measurements, unless a specific request is made by a customer. The milling process is different depending on the material being used,

Sam Davies goes through the doors at 6K Additive to understand how the company’s UniMelt systems yield high-quality metal powders.

“We only put in the reactor what we want to get out of the reactor.”

RAHN AG Zurich, Switzerland RAHN GmbH Frankfurt am Main, Germany RAHN USA Corp. Aurora, Illinois, USA RAHN Trading (Shanghai) Co. Ltd. Shanghai, China

but nickel will typically be put through a trigger-style mill that uses ball bearing and paddles to ‘mash, flatten and fracture’ the particulate. 6K is prepared to do this at various measurements, whether it’s a standard 15-45μm or a more unconventional 63-75μm.

“If a customer says they want 63-75μm, well, that’s just a little less sizing for us than if they want 15-45μm,” Roberts explains. “We only put in the reactor what we want to get out of the reactor, that’s what gives us a really high yield proposition. So, you can do some really interesting things. We have customers that are now starting to ask, because they’re looking to enhance their productivity, their parameters, for some strange things like bimodal distribution, because I can maybe optimise my machine and do something a little different with it.”

The only scenario in which 6K steps back from a sizing request is if the market for off-sized powder – say, for an EBM or binder jet process – is saturated to the point that competitors have so much stock they’re selling it for ‘dirt cheap.’ 6K Additive would rather avoid a ‘race to the bottom’ and instead only look to sell off-sized powder (measurements of 45-106μm were used as an example) for higher value metals such as tungsten.

6K Additive’s business model leans on a convergence of economics, sustainability and quality of the product. It won’t leverage the capabilities of its UniMelt if it doesn’t make economic sense to do so, but it won’t hesitate when it does – even if the prospect looks challenging on the surface level.

In its procurement of scrap metal, the company is able to buy feedstock at good value, but unsurprisingly the material isn’t always in the best shape when 6K Additive welcomes it into its facilities. Roberts uses an example of a batch of nickel material that was imported into the facility which had been processed through a system 60 times. It exhibited really high oxygen content and a lot of satellite splatter, but 6K Additive was able to process it with UniMelt after a quick pre-screen to remove any of the 'big splatter'. Out the other side, there was a 60% oxygen reduction in the nickel, while tap density and flow rate were ‘significantly increased.’

“Because you’re consolidating some of these particles, you really tighten the PSD, which is really important,” Roberts explains. “My view is, if additive is going to grow up one day and be mainstream, tightening the PSD and getting one lot to the next all the same [will] enable people to have really robust parameters, that no matter if my powder is the same today as it is two years from now, I get out of ‘well, this lot worked really well and this lot didn’t.’ That’s what they’ve been dealing with a lot with gas atomisers because they can’t control –tightening enough – the output.”

Ensuring high-quality powder is yielded from its UniMelt systems isn’t just a concern within the four operational bays – which are equipped with deflagration vents, flame sensors, and hydrogen detection systems – but also throughout the facility which houses various steps of the process. Roberts outlines that even though manufacturing material is the entire point, he never wants to see any powder around the facility. The company has already received its ISO 9000 quality assurance accreditation and is working on its AS 9100 Quality Management System standard.

With progress to build up the infrastructure and steadily increase

its manufacturing capacity here in Pennsylvania moving along nicely, 6K Additive also announced its intentions to expand into Europe – around 50% of the material it currently manufactures is exported to these shores. Last year, François Bonjour was appointed as its European Sales Director, and plans are being drawn up to establish a footprint on the European continent. There are two models being explored. The first is a co-location with super users to ‘create a factory within a factory’ to recycle used powder through on-site UniMelt systems, and the second is to replicate what the company is building in Pittsburgh and deploy a similar site in a centralised location.

“The goal is cost and sustainability,” Roberts sums up. “You need to be close to your customer and it’s convenient for us because they’re also our suppliers. It makes sense to have something here, something there [Europe], [and] at some point, something in Asia. What we’ve been working on over the last year and a half is finalising the blueprint, and then it’s just a matter of where we want to put it. Where’s the most strategic location? By year end, we want full distribution and consolidation at least set up in the EU as there’s a lot of used powder and there’s not an efficient way to get it back here. That’s the next step, we’re working on that pretty aggressively right now.”

SHOWN: 6K ADDITIVE'S UNIMELT SYSTEM

SHOWN: 6K ADDITIVE'S PITTSBURGH HEADQUARTERS

SCIENCE FACT

Oli Johnson speaks to experts in the field of 3D printing with resources found in outer space.

This isn’t just science fiction anymore.” The words of Dr. Amit Bandyopadhyay of Washington State University as we begin our conversation over Zoom. Bandyopadhyay has been a professor at the university since 1997, and in 2008 had a paper published about ceramic 3D printing. The paper did not get much attention from the wider AM industry at the time, but NASA got in touch and asked if the team would be interested in 3D printing with Lunar regolith, which Bandyopadhyay and his team successfully achieved in 2011. Regolith, for those that don't know, is a blanket of dust and broken rocks that sits atop a layer of bedrock on a planet.

The price of taking payloads into orbit can be astronomical (no pun intended), with costs of tens of thousands of dollars per kilogram. But 3D printing with regolith and other materials found locally on the Moon or even on Mars to manufacture parts saves weight and money for organisations such as NASA and SpaceX.

3D printing with Lunar regolith can be a challenge, as parts that are 100% printed in the material can be very brittle, with lots of air bubbles and porosities. The next step forward after Lunar regolith for Bandyopadhyay and his team was to 3D print with simulated Martian regolith, which when combined with titanium in the right mix, can create a material that exhibits better properties than titanium alone.

Bandyopadhyay told TCT: “Instead of making 100% metal parts, we can use the regolith, the locally available material, blend it with the metal and actually produce something. People have tried with plastic, and you can make something similar with plastic, but they might not have the highest strength. The final part that we produced has between 5 to 10% regolith, but another aspect we looked at is making a coating. You have a metallic surface that’s wear and tear is very high, but you can coat the entire surface with a hard ceramic, such as the Martian regolith, and it can be used as a radiation

shield and become a high wear and tear resistant material.

“But if you want to make something that is functional, you need to drop the ceramic content or regolith content down, so that it has enough strength and does not fall apart or is brittle. We have been doing this for many years, most of our work is in metals and ceramics, and it is exciting, spicy work, it is something different. I still feel that there is a lot of potential. Someone needs to do something otherwise our missions will fail, because we need to have some kind of manufacturing in outer space.”

Possibilities that are opened up by the idea of 3D printing with Lunar or Martianbased materials include the creation of habitats that would allow people to live on other planets. Construction 3D printing company ICON was awarded a 57.2 million USD contract from NASA in 2022 to develop a Lunar 3D printing construction system, as part of a joint goal to create the first ever construction on another planetary body. The contract builds upon previous NASA and Department of Defense funding for ICON’s ‘Project Olympus’, which aims to develop space-based construction systems to support the planned exploration of the Moon and beyond, using local Lunar and Martian resources as building materials.

In ICON’s press release announcing the NASA contract, Jason Ballard, ICON Co-Founder and CEO, said: “To change the space exploration paradigm from ‘there and back again’ to ‘there to stay’, we’re going to need robust, resilient, and broadly capable systems that can use the local resources of the moon and other planetary bodies. We’re pleased that our research and engineering to-date demonstrated that such systems are indeed possible, and we look forward to now making that possibility a reality. The final deliverable of this contract will be humanity’s first construction on another world, and that is going to be a pretty special achievement.”

FACT

some of the people who were trying to make it happen early on, now it’s a very large operation, with many, many people involved. If you think of the first 3D printer on the International Space Station, it was printing just a plastic part, but that is also a game changer. These are the small steps that show the confidence and the trust that the government has not only in the technology, but also in the organisations that I think can deliver something. Nothing is 100% guaranteed, but the point is it shows that we have reached a point where we believe this is possible. We believe this is doable, we believe that not 20, 30, 40 years from today, in the next five years we will see something like this happening. Fifteen years back, maybe we are thinking about Mars maybe one day. Today, we are talking about Mars in the next 10 to 12 years. Some of the things that are coming together and making it possible, and we are no longer just talking about the International Space Station, and just doing experiments and things of that nature, we are actually talking about going to the Moon and landing there again. And maybe that’s a temporary base, maybe Mars is the next step.”

scrap materials into 3D printable material, we’ve employed a commercially available, compact, and flexible gas atomiser unit. This unit recycles these materials, converting them into metal powders with an average particle size of 10 microns. To demonstrate this capability, we’ve utilised titanium recovered from an old aircraft structure. Since 1959, the scientific community has estimated the presence of approximately 187,400 kilograms of materials from artificial objects on the Lunar surface.”

Speaking about the practicality of making the idea of a 3D printed habitat on Mars a reality, Bandyopadhyay told TCT: “The printer needs to function right. So here on Earth, there’s an abundance of electricity available, you can have a high powered laser and you can print something very easily, but when you are on the Moon’s surface or on the surface of Mars, you’re talking about solar power. To make a printer that functions the way that it would here, the power aspect is a big challenge.”

When asked about the significance of the 57.2 million USD contract awarded to ICON, Dr. Bandyopadhyay said: “I’m very excited. I was involved with

Metal additive manufacturing company Incus is also exploring the area of 3D printing with resources found in outer space. In July 2023, the company announced that an 18-month-long collaboration with the European Space Agency had resulted in a successful project focused on 3D printing for the Lunar environment. A joint effort alongside prime contractor OHB System AG set out to establish the possibility of a zero-waste workflow using Lunar resources and scrap materials recovered from old missions or satellite debris, eventually contaminated by Lunar dust, to 3D print spare parts using Incus’ Lithography-based Metal Manufacturing (LMM).

The aim of the project was to show that creating a sustainable human base on the Moon is feasible, as the idea of leveraging Lunar manufacturing to support a human habitat is generally considered a challenge due to factors like atmosphere, gravity, temperature, radiation and the potential contamination of moon dust.

Incus CEO Dr. Gerald Miteramskogler told TCT: “To transform Lunar resources and

Speaking to TCT about what the next steps are to achieve the Lunar 3D printing goals of Incus, Miteramskogler said: “Following the successful project, there are still several essential steps to be taken in order to establish a fully functional 3D printing process for lunar operations, and we are eager to continue our efforts in this direction. The ESA project allowed us to demonstrate the feasibility of recycling scrap materials using LMM and highlighted the flexibility and resilience of our process in handling various raw materials. Building upon these achievements, we are now expanding our printer sizes to provide a solution for mass manufacturing using AM. We will be unveiling our Hammer Pro40 production printer at this year’s Formnext event. With this new system, I firmly believe that AM will play a significant role in addressing pressing challenges here on Earth.”

Miteramskogler also spoke about the importance of getting the chemistry of the materials used for 3D printing in outer space right. The Incus CEO told TCT: “It is crucial to consider the entire field of material science when evaluating test results. While impurities can enhance a material’s strength, this often comes at the cost of reduced flexibility, potentially resulting in increased brittleness. This, in turn, may lead to decreased longterm performance and reduced fatigue strength. Altered material properties might be suitable for everyday items in a lunar colony, such as cutlery or single-use surgical equipment. However, for technical or high-performance components like dental implants, tools or fittings, achieving the ideal chemistry of the material remains essential.”

“This isn’t just science fiction anymore.”

Market leading in-house technology combined with a skilled, experienced team ensures that CA Models

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●

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AHEAD OF THE GAME

Oli Johnson speaks to Carbon about the company’s bioabsorbable 3D printing elastomers.

In October 2022, Carbon announced that its developmental bioabsorbable elastomer platform had demonstrated biocompatibility in vivo (in a living organism), with all samples being classified as non-toxic and exhibiting tunable times for full absorption. The company’s bioabsorbable elastomers have the potential to be used in biomedical applications such as soft tissue repair, wound dressings and nerve conduits. Bioabsorbable polymers are often used in prosthetics due to their ability to be engineered to dissolve at the same rate as new bone growth.

Carbon says, despite there being many examples of bioabsorbable materials that exist in the medical device industry today, there are few examples of 3D printed elastomeric bioabsorbables. According to Carbon, its platform of bioabsorbable resin is capable of 3D printing customised, complex, and high-resolution elastomeric lattice structures. The resins offer tunable degradation, compatibility with gamma sterilisation, and biocompatibility through 180 days of in vivo degradation, making them suitable for soft tissue reconstruction and support applications.

Senior Resin Development Manager at Carbon Gina Policastro told TCT: “Functionalising these materials is not very straightforward, but we’re learning more and more about what people are doing and in the labs in universities about how we can. The first hurdle is making sure you have enough functionalisation sites to get the properties that you want at the end of 3D printing; stability is always a hurdle. These things are meant to degrade in the presence of water, so water and heat can break these materials apart. You need to ensure that you’re working at temperatures that are okay to work at, or the length of time is okay to work at. If printing time is too long, it could have adverse effects depending on how fast or how slow your polymers are meant to degrade. You have a whole toolbox to work with when you’re developing bioabsorbables, and all the different monomers that you start with are meant to degrade at different rates, so that’s a hurdle in itself when developing a bioabsorbable for a particular application.”

Speaking about how structures printed with the materials are used for wound healing, Policastro told TCT: “Wound healing cells will start to infiltrate in, then the cells start to break the material down, and will break it down enzymatically, which is just natural to your body. Then it will also break down in the presence of water, which you obviously have a ton of in your body. As it breaks down, these cells are proliferating and expanding in number and really starting to regrow that tissue layer, whether it be internally or your skin. Essentially just giving the cells a structure to grow on.”

Standing in the way of these types of bioabsorbable materials being used widely in healthcare is FDA approval. Only polymers for specific applications are being approved, and because Carbon’s exploration in this area is a new type of chemistry, and additive manufacturing is not widely used yet in medicine, the approval process is a big hurdle.

Isabella Palumbo, Business Development Director, MedTech at Carbon spoke to TCT about the next step in getting the materials used in healthcare: “We’ve taken the material as far as we can. Now we are looking for partners who have ideas for applications that would leverage this polymer or this biodegradable material. We are looking at a wide range of applications because there is nothing else like this on the market yet, so our aim is to find a partner to work with and finalise the resin, and to support them as they bring it through the FDA and clinical trials, and then to market.”

Speaking to TCT about why this development is a milestone, Gary Miller, Head of European Partner and Market Development at Carbon said: “I always say Carbon is ahead of the game. We’ve got materials that are world class, and do some fantastic things, and this another example of that. We’re bringing another material to market that nobody has ever thought about. There’s a lot of great uses, but there’s a lot of catching up to do with what Gina and the rest of the team are doing."

“We’ve got materials that are world class, and do some fantastic things...”

SHOWN: CARBON’S BIOABSORBABLE ELASTOMERS

In July 2023, students at the University of Sheffield broke a record. A liquid rocket engine, similar to the kind used by SpaceX, was built under the Sunride Project and successfully fired as part of the Race to Space initiative. What was special about this one? It is believed to be the first metallic 3D printed rocket engine to be built and successfully tested by students in the UK.

The ‘SunFire’ engine, which the Sunride team says is the most powerful studentbuilt engine of its kind, uses both fuel and an oxidiser rather than breathing in oxygen like a jet engine. The engine is also regeneratively cooled, which means it uses fuel to cool the combustion chamber before it is burnt, which increases efficiency and saves weight.

The Sunride team says that the University of Sheffield’s Royce Discovery Centre, a research facility developing next-generation materials to meet UK manufacturing needs, was ‘instrumental’ in trialling the laser powder bed fusion metallic 3D printing that was used to build the engine. The engine was machined after printing by the university’s Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (AMRC) and Faculty of Engineering.

Henry Saunders, who served as a Design Engineer on Project Sunride, and is now studying for a PhD in additive manufacturing at the university, told TCT: “I got into metal additive manufacturing through wanting to build this engine. I reached out to a professor who I knew had some metal 3D printers at the uni, Iain Todd, who I ended up doing my PhD with. That project started with the aim of building the first student-built, regeneratively cooled liquid rocket engine in the UK. I went about trying to get other masters students to do other areas of the project, so we recruited people to come in alongside us and do other areas of the rocket engine design such as the CFD for cooling channels, combustion stability design as well, so we had academic help for their final year projects.”

Speaking to TCT about pursuing a PhD in additive manufacturing, Saunders added: “I had a job offer from a company called Alloyed, and then I had a PhD offer as well, and I just felt like there was so much more I could learn with additive, and the facilities at Sheffield are really good to get hands-on

experience. There’s Aconity3D machines, Renishaws and some DED systems as well. There’s lots to play around with and it’s a really cool environment to be in.”

The engine was built by Saunders and his peers over a period of two years outside of their studies as part of the University of Sheffield’s Space Initiative, a programme to help STEM students use their skills to tackle some of the biggest problems in the industry after graduation. The rocket was then fired as part of the Race to Space initiative, which involved eight other teams, seven of which had rockets that were successfully fired.

building an actual liquid rocket engine would be invaluable, it will make us all stand out. Many people in the industry still haven’t experienced what we have working on this engine at the university. You can tell from how well our students are doing now in their careers, that we do have an advantage, we gave them the knowledge they need to excel in their career. I’m currently at Rolls-Royce, and I’m going to start working in combustion, the fact that I’ve done my masters dissertation on a liquid rocket engine combustion chamber gives me the edge.”

The Race to Space initiative, which was launched by Dr. Alistair John, Deputy Director of Aerospace Engineering at The University of Sheffield alongside Saunders, aims to provide students with practical experiences solving engineering problems, through hands-on experience of designing, manufacturing and testing rocket engines. According to the initiative’s website, it is building a “UK-wide space training infrastructure”, as well as addressing diversity issues such as a lack of opportunities for women, ethnic minorities, and those from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Dana Arabiyat, currently at Rolls-Royce, but who previously worked as a Design Engineer on Project Sunride and later Project Manager, told TCT: “We’ve been building rockets for a few years in Project Sunride, and to touch on propulsion was a very important step to increase a student’s knowledge and experience and get them ready for the space industry in the UK. We thought graduates in the UK lacked that practical knowledge, and we only learned rocket theory in university. We thought to have students get hands-on experience in

Dr. Alistair John added: “The space sector needs more highly skilled graduates. So we need to expose our students to practical engineering. Lots of aerospace degrees are pretty good on the theoretical side, but they get a limited experience of actually building and testing something real. So, to be able to go and actually test the rocket engine, make mistakes, test the rocket, actually fire it and see what happens, then iterate is a fantastic experience, and it’s really what this country needs more of. On top of that, it is expensive, but if you can find the funding and support, that’s obviously important, but what it does is give them the ability to really dream big.”

TCT asked both Arabiyat and Saunders what the moment was like when they got to successfully fire the SunFire engine on the first attempt. Arabiyat said: “Just the other day I was with a group of friends and I was asked: ‘If you could relive a moment in your life, what would it be?’ For me, it would be the moment I actually saw the flames coming out of the rocket, like I can’t believe it actually worked. It’s a moment I really want to re-live on repeat. We were being told: ‘Don’t worry if it doesn’t work’, and they just kept telling us not to expect much from the first try. It was two years of hard work waiting for this moment. We were all just looking at each other like, we did it, we actually did it.”

Saunders answered: “It was interesting actually, because I was due to be on a flight. We were in Oxford, and I had a flight from Gatwick that evening to go and do an experiment in France the following week. So, I was on quite a tight schedule to get it done, then it worked first time. It was unbelievable really. There’s a video of

Oli Johnson speaks to members of Sheffield University’s Project Sunride about the team’s record-breaking 3D printed liquid rocket engine.

“An incredible journey of learning, failing and reiterating.”

us from the bunker, we had to be in a control bunker, and so we were filming the screens, and we’re just swearing and going crazy. I was quite shocked the way it turned out.”

3D printing proved beneficial in bringing the design of the SunFire engine to life, as it allowed for the manufacture of small pipes for the cooling channels, integrated into the wall of the combustion chamber. Regeneratively cooling engines have been manufactured without 3D printing, but according to Dr. Alistair John, the cooling channels were ‘brazed on’ to the combustion chamber, whereas with a completely 3D printed rocket engine, the channels could be integrated and part of the design of the overall engine.

The SunFire engine had to be printed in two parts because of the height, and sealed together with a gasket. Dr. John told TCT that the team had worries that the engine would leak fluid, or fire would come out of the side, but the sealing technique worked.

Summing up her experience on the project, Arabiyat told TCT: “This has been a record-breaking competition where we had seven out of eight teams successfully get amazing flames out of their engines with the shock diamonds, it was just incredible what we managed to achieve. An incredible journey of learning, failing and reiterating, and project hand over as well, which is a very good skill. A lot of times you get started with something and then when these people graduate the project dies out. From design to test, the SunFire engine took two years to complete, so handing over to the next masters students, passing on the knowledge was a very important part of the process.”

The SunFire engine was fire tested at Airborne Engineering at the Westcott Space Cluster and 3D printed at the Satellite Applications Catapult. The Race to Space initiative is also believed to have set an unofficial world record itself, for the highest number of different hybrid/liquid rocket engines hot-fired for the first time on one site in one week.

Arabiyat also participated in another record-breaking launch as part of the SunRide Project in 2019, when a team of students fired a rocket 36,274ft into the sky, beating the previous UK record, which stood for 19 years, by almost 2,000ft. This rocket was named Helen in honour of The University of Sheffield’s Dr. Helen Sharman OBE, the first Briton in space.

SHOWN: THE DIFFERENT SECTIONS OF THE ENGINE

SHOWN: THE SUNFIRE ENGINE BEING SUCCESSFULLY FIRED ON THE FIRST ATTEMPT

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A DOLLAR AND A DREAM

Sam Davies speaks to Virginia Tech’s Professor Chris Williams about the use of 3D printing in a $1.5m tire retreading project.

and Manufacturing, Williams says two materials have been developed that perform as well as the conventional material. One is a ‘direct rubber’ material and the other is a ‘new age’ formulation, with the team suggesting it has found a way to ‘reduce the viscosity of rubbery material so that it is easily printed’ while still getting all the required properties. Key to these developments is the DREAMS Lab’s multi-stage printing process, which sees material selectively deposited through a nozzle, with a curing step coming later. This is facilitated by a robotic work cell that allows material to be conformally and precisely deposited onto a tyre surface with the support of 3D scan data and rapid toolpath changes.

When Chris Williams – the L.S. Randolph Professor in Mechanical Engineering at Virginia Tech – started out as a professor 15 years ago, he couldn’t envisage that his lab would ever build bespoke additive manufacturing (AM) equipment. Instead, his lab would devote their efforts to studying how existing processes affect novel material properties and the new design spaces such capabilities would afford.

Fast forward to 2023, though, and Williams finds himself working alongside several students with experience in building 3D printers at home, working with microcontrollers as a hobby, and a strong drive to push the boundaries of AM.

This capability is coming to the forefront as Williams’ DREAMS Lab – Design Research and Education for AM Systems – develops a new tyre retreading method through a 1.5 million USD research project. Funding comes from a 1:1 cost share between Virginia Tech and the REMADE Institute, which has been established by the US Department of Energy to accelerate the country’s transition to a circular economy. Arizona State University and industry partner Michelin will also be involved as they attempt to address the waste generated by retreading and the fuel efficiency of road vehicles.

In the US alone, 14.5 million tyres are re-tread every year. Conventional tyre re-treading methods use a buffing process to remove the remaining tread and sidewall rubber from the casing before new tread material is stitched to the casing and the built tyre is heated up to around 155°C during a curing process. This workflow sheds a significant amount of excess rubber and affects the performance of the tyre, which in turn can see more energy exerted.

“There’s an opportunity with additive to selectively re-tread,” Williams tells TCT.

“In the cases of uneven wear, instead of throwing away the entire tread, can we only re-tread a portion of a tyre? With traditional manufacturing, selectivity is not really something we can achieve, but with additive we can. The focus is reducing material waste, number one, and number two, is that when we retread tyres, currently there’s an increase in rolling resistance, which translates to reduced fuel economy.”

The retreading process being imagined by Williams and his team is one whereby a little buffing is required, but then only the worn-down section on the tyre’s cushion rubber is printed upon, with a traditional tyre tread being laid on top. To achieve this vision, Williams and co are midway through a two-year project that is seeing significant ongoing developments across polymer science, 3D printing and industrial robotics.

Working with Tim Long, formerly of Virginia Tech and now the Director of Arizona State’s Biodesign Center for Sustainable Macromolecular Material

“If we want to advance the state of the art, we can’t only treat AM as a singular standalone manufacturing solution,” Williams suggests. “So, [we’re] taking AM literally out of its box and using it as one of many tools that our robot can use. [That’s] what has got my attention right now - with robotic AM, we can print in true 3D, no longer just in stacks of 2D layers. We can change between both additive, subtractive, and pick-andplace tools. This project is a great opportunity to demonstrate this vision for the future of AM, and its for the cause of a more sustainable future.”

If the DREAMS Lab is successful, Williams estimates it could result in annual reductions of around 90 metric kilotons of tyre waste and 800 metric kilotons of C02 emissions across the retreading industry. In the next 12 months, one material from the two options will be selected, before testing with partners is carried out and a lifecycle assessment is performed to gauge the process’ economic and environmental impact.

The re-treading technique may then be taken forward by an industrial partner. That is somewhat out of the control of Williams and co, but in the technology they're developing, there is confidence that the potential goes beyond just the tyres on the wheels of our cars.

“It’s not just about tyre repair. One key aspect of this project is focused in automatically generating toolpaths from in-situ 3D scan data. And that’s applicable to every other additive and repair process,” Williams says. “In addition, the way in which we’re now printing elastomers is generalisable to any other kind of elastomer system, not just this one type of rubber. Our hope as scientists is that our work is something that will provide a foundation for other people to build on and take it where they think it needs to be.”

Image credits: Reilly Henson for Virginia Tech

SHOWN:

L TO R: GRADUATE STUDENTS YIQUN FU & TADEK KOSMAL MONITOR THE 3D PRINTING PROCESS

SHOWN: ROBOTIC ARMS USED FOR 3D PRINTING RUBBER MATERIALS ONTO TYRES

MAKE ME, CHANGE ME, SORT ME

This is where all the good stuff happens,” is not the introduction you might expect when stepping into the sorting space of a company that manufactures, polishes and dyes thousands of parts a day.

We’ve walked around more than half a dozen 3D printing systems and are about to walk by several part-finishing machines before heading upwards to see where the next machine instalments will live, but none of that stirs 3DPRINTUK CEO Nick Allen quite as much as this modest room equipped with a few monitors and trays.

Allen designed the entire building, but it’s the sorting room – not the 11 EOS P110, three P 396 or three HP Multi Jet Fusion systems – that we keep coming back to during this tour. The system that powers the company’s sorting was built in-house from the ground up some seven years ago, replacing another system also developed by the 3DPRINTUK team.

“And it’s never finished,” Allen says. “We launched [the current order management system] in 2019, and then we transitioned. So, we had a previous system which we had done ourselves as well, which was quite good, but it was nothing compared to this. We haven’t looked back.”

We step into the 3DPRINTUK offices on a gloriously sunny day in North London, the kind of afternoon where the company is getting its money’s worth out of the temperature and humidity control technology in its manufacturing facility on the ground floor. In mid-August, 3DPRINTUK is slightly less busy than it is outside of holiday season, but there are still employees rushing around us as we meander through the facility from sort room to 3D printers to dye stations and back to sort room. A focus on ‘batch production’ with ‘unit cost down and quantity up’ has meant 3DPRINTUK has always been wedded to powder bed fusion technology, with EOS and HP being the brands that the company is relying on.

Working with these technologies, 3DPRINTUK has been successful in churning out thousands of parts a day for a whole host of companies. Operating as an e-commerce company, 3DPRINTUK is only likely to hear from its customers in worstcase scenarios. For a service bureau, that means parts not being delivered on time.

Since onboarding the new management order system, 3DPRINTUK has reduced these instances by around 90%. Hence, Allen feels assured in his praise for the system.

The system covers everything from ‘quoting to accounting to pipelines to postproduction’ and is facilitating the sorting of between 3,500 and 5,000 parts a day. Each part is sorted after the build, sorted after secondary or tertiary finishing, and then sorted again for shipping. It can add up to 15,000 sorts a day.

Crucially, 3DPRINTUK is tracking parts not orders, with the tracking orders deemed inefficient by the company. As parts move through the additive manufacturing workflow, operators are faced with a wall of thumbnails depicting components currently moving through the facility. Here, they can input the number of parts that have been sorted, and the number of parts that are still to be sorted, as well as any issues that have occurred along the way, such as print defects during the build or parts damaged in the polisher. This keeps a log of where parts are up to in the workflow before a colour-coded system informs users which parts need what finish. At the final stage, parts have to be scanned before being packaged, and the system won’t let staff print labels if parts have been misplaced.

The order management system not only guides parts through the workflow, but it also provides extensive tracking. 3DPRINTUK retrieves data from all of its printing and post-processing hardware, helping to monitor machines, inform operators of the regularity of any issues and provide ratings against the most well-performing systems. Operators also have access to graphs and reports which assess the progress being made in relation to the order queue, as well as informing the user of what actions have been taken once issues have been raised. Monitoring is also done across stock, KPIs, lead times, supply chain, distribution and quality management.

3DPRINTUK’s quality management capabilities in particular were described as the ‘one of the best’ its auditor had ever seen as the company achieved ISO 9001:2015 late last year. All orders are now processed against this standard.

As 3DPRINTUK has established itself as one of the UK’s leading additive manufacturing service bureaus, its order management system has also helped to address many of the challenges service providers come up against, whether it be the repeatability of 3D printing technology or the reliable delivery of parts.

“We have made what we believe is the most efficient system in the world for what we do,” Allen says, “because we couldn’t find anything off the shelf that would work for us in any degree of accuracy or speed.”

Sam Davies reports on the management order system underpinning 3DPRINTUK’s 3D printing services.

“Nothing compared to this. We haven’t looked back.”

PUSHING FORWARD

Designability is a UK-based charity that has dedicated the last 50 years to co-designing products and solutions with disabled people to deliver greater independence. From its Wizzybug Loan Scheme, which provides fun, powered wheelchairs free of charge to children under five, to advocating for better accessibility on Electric Vehicle (EV) charging designs, the organisation’s focus is on human-centric design. Here, Laura Griffiths speaks to Dario Canini, Senior Design Engineer at Designability about where 3D printing fits in, and why accessibility should be an imperative design consideration.

TCT: Tell us about your role and how you came to Designability?

DC: My name is Dario Canini, and I have been working at Designability since 2021 as the Engineering Innovation Manager. I joined Designability during the Covid-19 pandemic. Towards the end of 2020, I faced a significant issue with my eyes, and it was only thanks to new technology and a dedicated doctor that I managed to resolve it. After this experience, I realised that volunteering for various organisations to help people was no longer enough for me. I wanted to dedicate 100% of my time and use all my engineering skills for this purpose. I had the opportunity to meet the Designability team at an event in Bristol. When they opened an engineering position, I applied immediately, and now, after more than two years, I am very happy and proud of my choice. If I were to describe my role, I would say that I lead the process that transforms a conceptual idea into a finished product. We are a small but highly skilled team, and we can cover all aspects from research to production.

TCT: Can you walk us through how new projects come about and where you start?

DC: At Designability, we use a ‘personcentred design’ approach for our projects which means that all of our projects start with requests or feedback that we receive from disabled individuals or organisations. First of all, we try to understand if we can support, improve an existing product, or develop something entirely new. In the initial phase, every project involves most of the departments within Designability. We need to ensure that we consider all aspects, from clinical to production. This is a lengthy but crucial process as it establishes a strong foundation for future projects. Personally, when I embark on a new project, I immerse myself in the problem. It's essential to step out of my comfort zone and educate myself about the different types of people who will use the final product.

For example, when I started the pushchair project for wheelchair users, I had never

used a wheelchair. My first action was to borrow a wheelchair and use it daily. I went to the park with my son, visited the supermarket, took the bus—essentially, I tried to understand what life was like with a wheelchair. I aimed to empathise with the end user. While I knew this was only a simulation, it was fundamental for understanding user feedback and opening my mind to the problem.

TCT: I noticed an element of 3D printing in the wheelchair-attachable pushchair project. Could you explain what, how, and why 3D printing was used?

DC: 3D printing technology plays a fundamental role in all project phases, from concept to pre-production. In the pushchair for wheelchair users project, we used 3D printing for all initial concepts, and the quality was so high that users could immediately assess the parts and provide feedback on usability. Years ago, a similar process would have required time and resources to machine the parts, but now, with a limited budget, we can regularly interact with users and refine the concept in all aspects before machining the final part. In this specific project, we used 3D printing not only for printing concepts but also for producing parts that would typically require injection moulding technology or specific tools. We incorporated these parts

into the first prototype that users tested in September 2022 during the initial user trial session. Even though I had already used 3D technology for structural parts, I am continually amazed by the advancements in this technology year after year.

TCT: How extensively is 3D printing leveraged in the product development cycle?

DC: After this project, I can guarantee that 3D printing technology is not limited to just prototyping. Before any pushchair moves into production, it must pass the BS EN 1888 standard, which certifies various aspects, including stability and brakes, essentially all safety aspects. Our

SHOWN: DESIGNABILITY ADOPTS 'PERSON-CENTRED DESIGN'

SHOWN: 3D PRINTED PART FOR PUSHCHAIR PROJECT

FORWARD

of Bath. We aim to provide students with the opportunity to learn the right approach to developing projects that place real people at the centre of the development process.

TCT: Is there a particular project or success story that you are most proud of?

DC: Honestly, I am proud of all my projects. I consider my projects like my children—born, grown, and becoming independent. However, there are three projects that hold a special place in my heart for different reasons.

The last project that I developed in Italy with my father, which involved creating a domestic blast chiller. When I was younger, I wasn't sure if I could become an engineer, and throughout my education, my parents provided massive support. I spent months working closely with my father, sharing ideas and traveling long distances to meet the client. By the end of this project, I had transformed from an insecure engineer needing to learn and find my way to a confident engineer who had successfully developed an idea. I will treasure this time and project for the rest of my life.

The first project where I independently handled all mechanical aspects for a UK medical company. It involved developing a reprocessing endoscope machine, and after several years, it has become the best-selling product in Europe and is ready for global distribution.

pushchair successfully passed all tests, and the most critical parts for the brake are produced using 3D printing technology. You can easily identify these parts in the product photos, such as the handle brake case and the brake cog part.

TCT: A benefit of 3D printing is the ability to mass customise. Is there an opportunity to create products that are better tailored or personalised to people's needs?

DC: Absolutely. Let me give you an example: many wheelchair users like to personalise their commercial wheelchairs or develop their wheelchairs according to their aesthetic preferences or desires. In the latter case, all wheelchair frames have different geometries and shapes. With 3D printing, we can print spacers to adapt our connectors to customers' wheelchair frames quickly, without the need for special tools and at a low cost. 3D printing is the ideal technology for giving people the freedom to customise or personalise their own objects.

TCT: What are your thoughts on how current product design for everyday items considers accessibility?

DC: I believe that current product design is beginning to consider accessibility more seriously, but we are only at the beginning of this journey. Many aspects are still not

adequately addressed, and regrettably, too many people continue to face limitations in their lives due to these oversights. The accessible pushchair project serves as a clear example: there are hundreds of different pushchair models on the market, yet it is estimated that there are over 16,000 disabled parents or carers of children aged 0-3 years in the UK who are manual wheelchair users, and there is no available product worldwide to meet their needs. This represents a significant limitation for disabled people.

TCT: In Designability's recent blog about making electric vehicle charging more accessible, several design challenges were identified. How important is it for these considerations to be integrated into initial design stages? And as we transition to next-gen technologies like EV, do you see an even greater opportunity to break away from traditional product design practices and create products that better cater to diverse needs?

DC: It is of utmost importance that these considerations are integrated into the initial stages of the design process. Currently, it seems that considering accessibility is seen as an optional aspect of product design. It's crucial for everyone to understand that accessibility should not be optional; it should be the foremost consideration in all projects. Thanks to my experience at Designability, I cannot imagine developing a product without considering accessibility. Designability and I believe that this aspect is so critical that we introduced a person centred design module at the University

The pushchair project for wheelchair users. This project fills me with immense pride because every time I meet a user, I witness the positive impact it has on their lives. During one of our recent user trials, we received feedback such as:

"To leave the house, I need to find someone to help me push the pram. I can't just go to the park or shops. I become a sideline watcher to my child."

"On the days when my babies wouldn't sleep, I wished I could walk them around the block to calm them."

"It's like the change when you get your first car. Suddenly, you are free to do what you want, whenever you want. True freedom."

This feedback alone vividly illustrates why I am so proud of this project and the Designability team.

I would also like to make a small observation about 3D printing in these three projects. The first project took place in 2007, while the most recent was in the present. In the first project, I used 3D printing only for early prototypes of some small components. However, in the last project, we used 3D printing to meet the BS standard. I can confidently say that my engineering journey has evolved alongside advancements in 3D printing technologies. The next step for the accessible pushchair design is to find a licensing partner who will enable us to get it manufactured and available for parents and carers to purchase.

SHOWN: DESIGNABILITY USES AM IN ALL PROJECT PHASES

RISING STAR

At the TCT Awards in 2023, TCT teamed up with the Sanjay Mortimer Foundation to launch the TCT Sanjay Mortimer Foundation Rising Star Award. The award was established to shine a spotlight on an up-and-coming neurodivergent young person who has the potential to contribute greatly towards the engineering industry.

Sixteen-year-old Zac Smith was the inaugural recipient of the award, after being nominated by his teachers at Simon Langton Grammar School for Boys. Smith was one of the youngest nominees for the award, which includes the prize of a Prusa 3D printer, as well as the opportunity to become an SMF Star, providing access to grants, training and more.

Speaking about how he first became involved with 3D printing, Smith told TCT: “I used to buy a lot of Nerf blasters, and had a lot of fun with them, but over time I heard about people online modifying them to make them more powerful, shoot faster, and a lot of people were using 3D printing for that. Then when I attended secondary school, I went to the design department and my teacher there, Mr Cunningham, he was amazing. Basically I asked him if I could print off this part because it broke and I couldn’t find a replacement. From there I was like, ‘Oh this is cool, let’s do some more of this.’ And then he

was showing me the software, how to slice, how to do CAD, and then eventually we’re taking machines apart and fixing them.”

Smith was offered a job at 14 by the YouTube channel 3D Muskateers, after watching a video and hearing that they were hiring people who could work with CAD. Smith told TCT: “This was during COVID, so I was [working with] Fusion 360 almost every day and had learned builds up to a pretty decent level, so I thought I would give it a shot. I sent an email, saying ‘Hey, I don’t even have a CV but can we go on a Google Meet or a Zoom and have a chat?’ Now I’ve done half a dozen projects for him over the years.”

The Sanjay Mortimer Foundation was founded in 2022 in honour of the late Sanjay Mortimer, a CoFounder of E3D-Online, who passed away at the age of 32. Mortimer lived with ADHD and transformed it into his superpower to build one of the leading companies providing 3D printing nozzles, extruders, and essentials. In an effort to continue this spirit of innovation and championing of neurodivergent children and young adults, the SMF plans to introduce a series of awards and initiatives as part of its future outreach.

Teula Bradshaw, Director of the Sanjay Mortimer Foundation told TCT: “We’re so grateful to TCT for

helping us to continue Sanjay’s legacy and gifting this award. It was a fabulous way to kick off the SMF. We couldn’t think of a better way to share our story, to recognise Zac for who he is and all his brilliance and get our message out there. Our main aim of the SMF is to give confidence to neurodivergent individuals who find an outlet in making. We really want to help them realise their talents and give them the confidence to go out into the workplace, so they can explore their capabilities and develop themselves.”

Speaking about what businesses can do to be more inclusive of neurodivergent individuals in the workplace, Bradshaw added: “What we’d like to do is push for organisations to acknowledge their capacity to think differently and beyond the convention of boundaries that make them a valuable asset to any organisation. Everything is different for every individual, but if they can implement small changes like providing quiet spaces, allowing headphones or slightly adapting interview processes, its not an expensive thing that needs to happen really. Then we can properly appreciate the capacity of neurodiverse individuals that have an ability creatively and in a visionary mindset, like Sanjay and Zac, and really could be a major asset.”

Oli Johnson speaks to the winner of the inaugural TCT Sanjay Mortimer Foundation Rising Star Award Zac Smith, as well as Executive Director of the SMF Teula Bradshaw

“The main aim of the SMF is to give confidence to both younger and older people and help them realise their talents.”

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3D PRINTING FOR PRODUCTION

CAN DFAM ENABLE MORE ACCESSIBLE PRODUCT DESIGN?

We asked AM experts, consultants, and accessibility advocates for their take on whether design for AM can enable greater opportunities for more accessible product design.

STEVE

COX

, 3D Technologies Consultant, Amfori Consulting

“3D printing doesn’t have to be complex to be powerful”. That’s a statement I often use when talking about its application in the area of assistive devices for those with disabilities. For those people, suitable mass-produced products are often not available at all or, if they are, don’t satisfy their individual needs since everyone’s circumstances can be very unique.

That’s where 3D printing can step in with delivering bespoke assistive solutions on a tailored, one-off basis. Part manufacture using 3D printing is only part of the story though because the solution needs to be designed in the first place, and maybe iterated a few times, before getting things just right. That’s where democratisation of CAD skills and an understanding of DfAM is so important. The more people who have those skills the more accessible, far-reaching and powerful these assistive solutions will be.

SONIYA PATEL, Co-founder, Hominid X

“Design changes are complex & expensive.”

“Not enough revenue to be made.” These are what many product design companies claim to be the reasons for not designing products for “niche” target customers.

While numerous healthcare designers use AM to create fully customised implants and prostheses, many often overlook another significant advantage: lowvolume production. Hominid X produces

assistive aids to help people with daily living. Although hand disability is common, individual situations can be complex and unique. When we encounter a customer whose needs are not met by our product, we quickly develop and test a prototype using AM for bridge production. DfAM has helped our company grow faster and help more people than with traditional tools. With the amount of accessible Additive Technology for end-use products and tooling creation available, there is no excuse for product design companies to not consider its use to create more accessible products.

SUZANNE WINTERFLOOD, Central Region Coordinator, Makers Making Change

According to Statistics Canada, 80% of people living with a disability often use an assistive device to increase their independence, and 27% need at least one more. Cost is often cited as the main barrier.

Neil Squire’s Makers Making Change program encourages community volunteer makers to use 3D printing for social good providing affordable open-source alternatives using modern AM techniques. We support STEM education through an assistive technology lens, encouraging young people to tackle real-world challenges and to empathise with people with disabilities. Our adaptive gaming program has opened a new and exciting world of accessibility with DIY customisable 3D printed joysticks providing a level playing field for all. 3D printing technologies have opened up a world of possibilities for volunteer makers to learn new skills while providing life change devices to those who

need them. The opportunities are endless and can translate into areas we have not even yet considered.

JOB VAN DE LAAR, Operations Manager, Shapeways

At Shapeways, we have always had a strong belief in the real change AM can provide to the world, and nowhere is this more clear than in accessible product design. DfAM enables us to move away from a “one size fits none” standard solution and create easily adaptable and affordable solutions that can really empower all individuals. Our collaboration with Microsoft on adaptive accessories that have been designed in partnership with the disability community is a great example of how no two people are alike, and how that translates to their needs for technical accessories and customisation too. As AM technologies and design software improve further, projects like these are only the beginning. We are convinced that DfAM will directly improve many other accessible products in the coming years and help create an inclusive environment for everyone.

HENRIKE WONNEBERGER, COO and Co-founder, Replique

DfAM presents a huge opportunity that extends far beyond technical advantages such as lightweighting. It offers the ability to highly individualise products. You can see this in the prosthetics sector, where prosthetics for teeth and other body parts are designed uniquely for each patient. But it also finds its way into more “standardised” products that can benefit significantly from higher customisation. Just recently our customer RehaMedPower, a German-based medical supplier specialising in wheelchairs, launched the electric wheelchair RP1 which demonstrates the potential of DfAM perfectly. RehaMedPower wanted to create a wheelchair that is tailored to individual needs without compromising cost-efficiency during production. That is why we turned to 3D printing, which resulted in an impressive reduction of prototyping time by 30% and development costs by 60%. But the real benefit lays in its customisation freedom. By designing components with 3D printing in mind from the beginning, we ensured that parts remained cost-effective during AM serial production.

SHOWN: SHAPEWAYS MICROSOFT ADAPTIVE ACCESSORIES