TCT North America 6.4

Automotive + rail Lightweight design and spare parts innovation.

MAG

sustainabilitY AM leaders weigh in on the industry's hottest topic.

NORTH AMERICAN EDITION VOLUME 6 ISSUE 4

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TAILOR-MADE METAL

6K SCRAPS THE BELIEF THAT AM IS SUSTAINABLE

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EDITORIAL

HEAD OF CONTENT

Daniel O’Connor e: daniel.oconnor@rapidnews.com t: 011 + 44 1244 952 398 DEPUTY GROUP EDITOR

Laura Griffiths e: laura.griffiths@rapidnews.com t: 011 + 44 1244 952 389

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Samuel Davies e: samuel.davies@rapidnews.com t: 011 + 44 1244 952 390

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PRODUCTION

Sam Hamlyn Matt Clarke Ellie Gaskell

MANAGEMENT C.E.O. / PUBLISHER

Duncan Wood

VP, CONTENT, STRATEGY AND PARTNERSHIPS

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FROM THE EDITOR

FROM THE EDITOR SAM DAVIES

They don’t always mean fine birds, but, 18 months ago in Shanghai, a pretty decent effort at a 3D printed feather spoke accurately to the current state of the additive manufacturing industry.

It was laid out on a table inside Lubrizol’s TCT Asia stand, frayed in parts, jagged in others, but it was a feather, produced on a HP Jet Fusion machine in Lubrizol’s ESTANE 3D TPU M95A material and an example of the freedom of design conventional manufacturing technologies don’t afford.

The material, at the time, had not yet been certified for use, the post-processing was lacking, and Lubrizol’s higher ups were unsure whether it should be exhibited in place of some more refined sample parts. But the company’s 3D Printing Marketing Manager, Dave Pasqual, reckoned that would create ‘false expectations’ – “Look,” he said, “we can make a feather, and it needs to be improved, fair enough. It’s not coloured, it’s not sanded, so it’s not perfect, but that’s where we are today in TPUs. This is a learning curve.”

In this issue of TCT Magazine, in addition to our annual automotive focus (this year supplemented by the latest in the rail and heavy indsutry segments too!), and education, professional AM machinery and consumer product features, we have a four-page sustainability special. It is here as businesses far and wide work to reduce the usage of nonrenewable energy, and reuse and recycle materials - that additive manufacturing companies believe

they have a huge role to play.

On pages 20 and 21, an array of industry executives outline how that can happen. But can is the key word. As referenced by 6K in the cover story, despite its potential, there’s still a huge additive waste problem yet to be tackled; as stressed in our interview with industry consultant Dr Phil Reeves on page 17, there’s a whole host of considerations that need to be made throughout the lifecycle of each part to achieve true sustainability; and as noted by Sherry Handel of the Additive Manufacturer Green Trade Association on page 19, more research is required as a result.

There are considerations aplenty for vendors and users of additive manufacturing to achieve sustainable production processes, but as Reeves explains, an important factor in doing so lies within one of AM’s strongest attributes. Throughout this magazine, there are examples of such efforts: in the lightweighting of car parts at Briggs Automotive Company and Bugatti, in the advancement of spare rail parts engineered by Siemens, in the development of unibody bike frames by Arevo and even in a rough-around-the-edges trade show sample part.

It’s the design capabilities of AM which makes it a potentially sustainable technology, but as with Lubrizol’s imperfect feather, there must be an awareness and acknowledgement that the industry is still on a learning curve.

VOL 6 ISSUE 4 / www.tctmagazine.com / 03

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TCT VOLUME 6 ISSUE 4

COVER STORY

6

06. TAILOR-MADE METAL How 6K Additive's UniMelt Plasma technology is making the manufacture of AM powders more sustainable.

Automotive + Rail

9

09. A 3DPRINTED OBJET D’ART

Bugatti and APWORKS discuss the design and additive manufacture of exhaust components for the Bugatti Chiron models.

10. STRIPPED BAC

How Briggs Automotive Company reengineered a supercar with generative design and 3D printing.

12. ADDITIVE IS A LIGHTHOUSE

Assistant Editor Sam Davies explores how Siemens Mobility’s spare parts innovation programme is enabling its street cars customers to 3D print replacement rail parts.

14

HEAVY INDUSTRY

14. LEADING THE WAY

Sam speaks to Baker Hughes on its deployment of AM at seven centres of excellence.

17

22

Design + Professional AM 22. PICTURE PERFECT

Head of Content Dan O’Connor looks at Stratasys’ latest system that sneaks in under the CONTEXT defined Design Class of 3D printers.

25. LEAVE IT TO THE PROS

A look at how the Professional AM machinery market has prevailed amidst a global pandemic.

27

CONSUMER PRODUCTS

27. AREVO’S FRAMEWORK

Sam talks to Arevo CEO Sonny Vu about the composite 3D printing technology behind a new crowdfunded e-bike series.

Skills + Education

29

29. RE-DESIGNING EDUCATION

Peter Gough at PrintCity, Manchester Metropolitan University talks about the university’s fresh approach to admissions for its Industrial Digitalisation course.

6

EXECUTIVE Q&A

30

30. ON TOP FORM

Our executive interview series continues with Formlabs Co-founder and CEO Max Lobovsky sharing details on the company’s new large-format dental 3D printer.

32 expert advisory column 32. WHAT THE HECK AM I DOING HERE?

Nora Touré, Director, Sales and Service Factory Operations at Fast Radius and Founder of Women in 3D Printing on reaching - quite literally - new heights in her additive manufacturing career

30

SUSTAINABILITY 17. SUSTAINABILITY SPECIAL

Leaders in AM discuss the challenges and realities around 3D printing’s sustainability claims, plus a column from the AMGTA’s Executive Director Sherry Handel.

22

TAILOR-MADE M 6K scraps the belief that AM is sustainable

A

dditive Manufacturing (AM) is not as sustainable as you might think.

Turn to our feature on page 17 and you’ll find hot takes from myriad industry leaders on the intrinsic sustainability properties the technology can offer versus the areas where more consideration needs to be taken.

SHOWN:

UNIMELT SYSTEM INSIDE 6K ADDITIVE'S BURGETTSTOWN, PA FACILITY

One of those voices is 6K Additive, a newcomer to the AM market who, despite its potential, claim AM to be no more efficient than subtractive manufacturing. In what it describes as “the dirty little secret of making powders for additive manufacturing”, whereby an estimated 70% of material is lost in the manufacture of powder and up to 40% lost in printing, 6K believes it has the ability to uniquely address this challenge and recapture that lost productivity value in a way that leverages certified scrap material from CNC millings and turnings that makes producing AM sustainable.

With a reported 1 million pounds of titanium powder capable of being upcycled per year at its dedicated ISO9001 facility, it would appear they may be onto something.

DESIGNER MATERIAL

For the longest time, post-processing has shouldered the guilt as AM’s “dirty little secret” but 6K, a company specializing in plasma technology with a dedicated focus on additive, says the onus belongs elsewhere.

According to research from The Barnes Global Advisors, powders are on track to become the single dominant cost of an AM part over the next five years. Using the example of a titanium component, as improvements in print technology and process improve, total part cost is expected to decrease dramatically by around 70%. As a result, by 2025 powders will foot the majority of the bill of an additive part at around 40% of the total cost.

06 / www.tctmagazine.com / VOL 6 ISSUE 4

But one person’s scrap is another person’s gold. Citing an inherent link between sustainability and cost, 6K, whose technology converts certified chemistry machined millings, turnings and other recycled feedstock sources into premium AM-ready metal powders, believes it has the solution, located inside a new 45-acre campus in Burgettstown, Pennsylvania.

Enter 6K’s UniMelt Plasma System, a first of its kind plasma-based system for advanced nanomaterials production, which aims to eliminate the waste that exists in today’s material production process by fine tuning powder to the needs of the 3D printer. Essentially, any machined alloy can now become a 3D printable powder.

Compared to plasma and gas atomization techniques traditionally employed to manufacture AM powders,

feedstocks processed via the UniMelt system are said to deliver up to four times the amount of usable powder for strong, high-density parts made by laser, EBM and binder jet processes. Feedstock is processed in a contamination-free inert atmosphere to create perfectly spherical, porosity free, high flowing powder in a single-pass continuous process which turns commodity feedstock into engineered particles in just two seconds with up to 100% yield. The resulting powder is said to provide “superior performance and versatility versus best-of-breed powders.” Operating at 6,000 degrees, the UniMelt process is capable of high throughput production of advanced materials including Onyx Ni718 and Onyx Ti64 AM powders and a wide range of ferrous alloys, nickel superalloys, cobalt-based alloys, refractory metals and beyond.

IMPOSSIBLE ALLOYS

Back in June, 6K announced commissions of its first two commercial systems for the production of nickel super alloys and titanium powders, with plans to commission additional UniMelt systems throughout 2021. While nickel and titanium have been prioritized due to

cover story

METAL “We have the ability to produce materials that you can't produce conventionally.”

6 BELOW:

SPINAL IMPLANTS PRINTED FROM RECLAIMED TI-64

4 RIGHT:

FIRST EVER HIGH ENTROPY ALLOY “UNOBTANIUM” PRINTED PART

expected demand, for what comes next, 6K believes it’s important to look at where the value is. Sure, they could do stainless steel and aluminum if they wanted to, but 6K says it’s more interested in producing what others can’t.

“We have the ability to produce materials that you can't produce conventionally and haven't been produced additively,” 6K Additive’s Chief Marketing Officer Bruce Bradshaw explained, pointing to an example showcased at last year’s Formnext (shown above).

This world-first High Entropy Alloy “Unobtanium” 3D printed part saw 6K alloy five unique elements, including two with melting temperatures ~900°C apart.

For industries like medical, automotive, and aerospace, these new material possibilities are thought to be opening up opportunities for products that were not otherwise achievable through conventional melt approaches. Whether it’s an oil & gas engine impeller printed using reclaimed Ni625 or rejuvenating powder for rocket propulsion as demonstrated in a recent partnership between Relativity Space, 6K’s UniMelt’s new process for producing premium powder in a sustainable way is setting a new mark in advanced materials.

“We’re getting a lot of folks approaching us to create materials that can’t be produced anyplace else,” Bradshaw said.

“The aerospace market is looking for alloys that have unique characteristics; high temperature, different melting points, things along those lines for rocket

engines [for example]. On the medical side, we’re working on a material that you commonly see as a coating, but it’s not produced as a full implant. This [material] has legs across the entire medical space, it won’t just be limited to one company, but this initial company will come out to market with their first product [using this material].”

Providing the example of the orthopaedics market, 6K says it can produce TiN powders for a revolutionary approach to 3D printed femoral components which could lead to a single material implant that’s half the weight of a typical industry standard design and 50% reduction in patient wait times.

As AM factories become a reality, 6K says it can also create long-term, value-based relationships through a circular supply chain. That means any waste generated by users through the likes of used powder, support structures or non-spec parts can be fed back into the UniMelt system to create new, virgin powder and unlock further value.

Additive manufacturing has the lead in terms of sustainability over conventional manufacturing, but clearly, as 6K has demonstrated, there are vast improvements on the materials production front that take AM to a whole new level of environmental impact and ultimately, enable additive to live up to its true sustainable potential.

VOL 6 ISSUE 4 / www.tctmagazine.com / 07

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Automotive + Rail

A 3D PRINTED OBJET D’ART

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Bugatti Body Development Construction Engineer Jens Wenge [JW] & APWORKS Head of Project Engineering AM Sebastian Lepa [SL] discuss the design & additive manufacture (AM) of exhaust components for the Bugatti Chiron models.

Bugatti has a renowned relationship with SLM Solutions, so why has the company teamed with APWORKS’ to 3D print Chiron exhaust parts?

JW: APWORKS came into play when I attended a workshop with EOS and CSI group, another important engineering supplier for Bugatti. Within this workshop we identified the taillight trim cover as a potential part for 3D printing. We realized the chance to implement not only an incredibly stylish object but also to reduce weight in one step. Because of the good experiences CSI had with APWORKS and the relationship between APWORKS and EOS, we decided to do this project with them.

We first heard of the Bugatti and APWORKS partnership after the Chiron derivative broke the 300mph barrier in 2019, while equipped with metal 3D printed exhaust finishers.

How were these parts designed and why was 3D printing suitable?

JW: The advantage of 3D printed parts is that we are able to focus on the part's function. The shape is optimized for the exhaust mass flow and we can ignore conventional restrictions that lie in the manufacturing process. The second important fact is that we only needed one prototype for the Super Sport 300+ world record car.

SL: AM allows for innovative geometric shapes that contribute to the extraordinary performance of hyper sports cars.

JW: The team around the world record did a great job, working with members from each

engineering department of Bugatti. The aerodynamic team, for example, spent hours simulating the airstream and tested it many more hours in the wind tunnel at Dallara. They performed various CFD analysis to investigate aerodynamic phenomena occurring in the wake zone behind the vehicle and they calculated in their simulations exactly how much of the exhaust flow has to be directed into the rear diffuser, depending on the height of the vehicle and speed, so that the optimum downforce was achieved on the rear axle and that the exhaust fumes support the air roller at the rear.

Soon after, the 3D printed exhaust tailpipe for the Chiron Pur Sport was unveiled – what were the design considerations for this part and what changed from the traditionally engineered exhaust components?

JW: Really important in the first place was the realization of an outstanding exhaust tailpipe: an 'objet d’art.' But bringing the exhaust tailpipe wasn’t a oneshot solution.

SL: The design of the trim brings AM to its limits. A lot of optimizations have been applied on the part design to reduce the part’s weight, but also enable a perfect and reliable manufacturing process. The numbers of the part speak

for itself: Down to 0.4mm wall thickness; approximately 22cm long, 48cm wide and 13cm high; weighing just 1.85kg including grille and bracket. Due to the requirements and the dimensions of the part, the material of choice is titanium and the system is an EOS M400-4. Printing huge titanium parts including walls down to 0.4mm means overcoming thermal stress in order to avoid component distortions.

JW: Our engineers therefore worked in close collaboration with APWORKS’ applications team. Regular exchange, design iterations and printing tests finally led to the impressive part design and low weight.

SL: We integrated lattice structures to stabilize walls while keeping the part’s weight low and added honeycomb structures to support walls with only 0.4mm thickness. In addition, we developed a completely new way of support geometries for thin walled parts from a geometry and laser parameter perspective.

JW: There is no way to transfer a stylish design to the real part in a conventional production process. The degrees of freedom of AM allow you to realize the vision from our designers, to optimize mass flow, to implement a thermal isolating function and, in this case, reduce the part's weight by 45%. The exhaust tailpipe is only what it is thanks to this new and innovative technology.

SHOWN: BUGATTI CHIRON PUR SPORT EXHAUST TAILPIPE PRODUCED WITH METAL AM

VOL 6 ISSUE 4 / www.tctmagazine.com / 09

WORDS: LAURA GRIFFITHS

P

arked next to Liverpool’s rainsoaked docks under a moody grey sky and the watchful eye of the Liver Birds, the Briggs Automotive Company (BAC) Mono looks like it could have been driven straight out of a Gotham City panel – not an industrial park just shy of 10 miles up the road.

Just like that unconventional, distinctively Northern England backdrop, which blends effortlessly with the Mono’s black and silver aesthetic, this single seater supercar is uninterested in the mundane functionality of your typical set of four wheels. As Briggs Automotive Company Co-founder and Director of Product Development Ian Briggs recently told TCT, the BAC Mono was designed purely for the sport of driving.

“We don't have to think about any other function for this product other than, a guy's going to get in it and he just wants to drive, he doesn't necessarily even want to go anywhere,” Briggs says of the Mono’s niche demographic; the kind of customer who might already have half a dozen hypercars tucked away in their garage.

“For us, it's a really simple focused target and that is to reduce weight, increase power, get the mass towards the centre of the vehicle, get the mass as low as we can.”

Building on design DNA first seen in last year’s Mono R, the new Mono is lighter and boasts a higher performance figure of 332bhp thanks to a 2.3-litre fourcylinder turbocharged engine and over 400Nm of torque. With a design brief set to make the car “visually lighter, cleaner and more simplistic,” each body panel, all re-engineered to reduce visual mass, features graphene-enhanced carbon fiber to decrease weight and enhance strength.

The subject of weight has been the focus of an ongoing partnership between BAC and Autodesk since 2014, recently demonstrated in the Mono’s alloy wheels, which have been generatively designed to speed up the iteration process and reduce weight.

010 / www.tctmagazine.com / VOL 6 ISSUE 4

“The best place to save weight on the car is the tyre. The next best place is the wheel,” Briggs said, explaining the thought process behind the Mono’s latest iteration.

“But given the Mono was quite well optimized in that respect anyway, we took a clean sheet, looked at everything and started with the most important part which was develop a new tyre with Pirelli. Next was our carbon wheel.”

The team worked with Autodesk Research to determine how generative design in Fusion 360 could be applied to quickly explore design outcomes, taking into account real world performance criteria, standards testing data, manufacturing methods and materials, and BAC’s signature aesthetics.

“We could straight away, within a matter of hours, see the most optimized version of that wheel,” Briggs said. “We could kind of come back to it rather than work from the other direction where you start off, you're always making steps towards little improvements each time and then just deciding how long you keep going through that process.”

Starting with key performance needs and manufacturing constraints in mind, this technique almost allows engineers to work backwards compared to an extensive iteration process to reach the optimum result. Andy Harris at Autodesk Research explained: “Where we normally would look at the performance, the mass and the cost, which generative design as a product gives us, we wanted to also explore aesthetics as a fourth dimension. So, with a lot of guidance from BAC on brand identity and the kind of aesthetics the final design had to have, we were able to basically direct generative design in a way that it generated a large cluster of designs that all were very similar in aesthetic look.”

CNC milling in aluminum was identified as the best option with the team going from 3-axis to 5-axis milling at Autodesk’s UK-based Technology Centre. The result

“I can see [3D printing] on every metal component on the car.”

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was a redesigned 2.2kg wheel alloy finished in BAC’s signature ‘gunmetal grey’ that’s 35% lighter and compliant with stringent European structural regulations. The total wheel weight is now 4.7kg for the front wheels and 4.9 kgs for the rear, including both the alloy and carbon rim. Briggs recalls demonstrating the new design to a customer who was left stunned upon realizing they could pick it up as easily as a glass of water.

The Mono’s 570kg weight is also owed to enhancements in graphene and end-use additively manufactured parts. In addition to prototyping and R&D, the Mono has around 40 3D printed end-use parts installed, printed with HP Multi Jet Fusion and an Ultimaker S5, such as front and rear light surrounds, mirror arms and housing, front hatch hinges, and engine inlet components. Adam Mughal, Lead 3D Designer at Briggs Automotive Company recently described how BAC managed to get the cost of the car’s wing mirrors down from 60 GPB to just 10 GBP by 3D printing them in two parts. In-house 3D printing capabilities in the form of an Ultimaker S5 with a closed build chamber, are a fairly recent addition to the BAC shop floor following a meeting with global science and materials company DSM where a Novamid CF carbon fiber 3D printed

motorcycle brake lever with properties similar to that of cast aluminum helped make that “mental leap,” as Briggs puts it, to see 3D printing as a production tool.

“Straight away I can see it [3D printing] on every metal component on the car,” Briggs says. “We've got 3D printed plastic parts now that are supporting things like electronic control units or even supporting things like the wiring harness.

The car's got a solid mounted engine, you can’t have any unsupported wiring in the car, it vibrates and eventually it fails. So, we strive to support wiring everywhere on the car in these places and we make little 3D printed parts now to do that.”

Briggs says the team has a roadmap in mind for how the car might look in future models and while generative design is only a small part of the Mono’s style today, that might not be the case for long.

“There are a lot of revolutions coming in the car industry, and with generative design, to change how cars are designed, engineered, built and look. It's a super exciting time in the car industry […] it’s a challenging one but I think it's super exciting.”

VOL 6 ISSUE 4 / www.tctmagazine.com / 011

WORDS: sam davies

O

ften based along dangerous coastlines or nearby safe passages to land, the lighthouse is at once a structure to aid maritime navigation and a metaphor for risk, guidance and direction.

In their evolution from hilltop fires to constructed towers with electric light, perhaps we can add improvement in function and performance too.

Siemens Mobility, in its application of additive manufacturing (AM) for the rail industry, can relate to many of those characteristics.

Since 2013, the company has deployed six project leaders, all with engineering expertise; five support staff, with responsibilities in application management and logistics; and six manufacturing engineers, to additively manufacture more than 13,000 spare parts for the sector in seven years. Around the same time, Siemens delivered a presentation to many of its street cars customers and made its pitch.

3 LEFT:

In this meeting, where the potential to shorten the turnaround times for spare parts was discussed, SWU Verkehr outlined how it wanted to alter the design and functionality of its tram drivers' armrests, and asked whether such a component could be 3D printed.

It was. And it became the first of 1,300 designs that would not only meet the necessity to replace components but align with Siemens Mobility’s idea to advance parts at the same time.

“If you touch a part which is 30 to 60 years old, and change the production method and material, you have to do the complete approval by the newest standards regulations,” explains Michael Kuczmik, Siemens Mobility Head of Additive Manufacturing. “If our designers have to do the engineering and consider the new standards and regulations, then we said, okay, we [might as well] improve the part.”

Siemens would come to learn how the certification of ‘first of its kind’ replacement components could require up to a year for certification to be granted. There have been other instances, however, where extensive R&D hasn’t been required and newly certified spare parts

012 / www.tctmagazine.com / VOL 6 ISSUE 4

SUSPENSION BRACKET OF A DT4 BRAKE CALIPER UNIT CREDIT: SIEMENS MOBILITY

have been delivered within just nine days. Of course, these lead times are one-offs – once certification is granted, a spare part that required months of engineering work and then spent months in the certification process can be continually delivered in the time it takes to manufacture, finish and ship. And the less time the better, for Siemens has some customers who are losing thousands of Euros a day on idle vehicles at the depot.

For companies like SWU Verkehr, those thousands a day are critical. SWU operates a fleet of 22 trams in the cities of Ulm and Neu-Ulm, meaning one idle vehicle represents around 5% of

its fleet and 5% of its revenue within its tram service offering. It means SWU 'simply cannot afford' to shut down a vehicle because a replacement part is missing. But while the urgency of installing spare parts and getting trams back on the rails is paramount, there’s an understanding that improving the parts as they’re replaced makes sense in the long run.

The company started out on its implementation of 3D printed parts with the updated driver’s armrest raised in the initial meeting, which would go on to feature three additional operational controls, channels for cables to run through, an increased stiffness to guard

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against future damages, integrated cable fixation, and serial numbers for part identification and traceability.

Another instance in which SWU leveraged Siemens' 3D printing capacity was to make improvements to the exterior of a vehicle.

Since SWU’s trams navigate through busy cities alongside bustling road traffic, there are, on occasion, collisions between tram and car. A quick and easy improvement to the tram’s front skirt, SWU posited, was a day running light which would help to make the vehicle more visible to other road users. “’Yes, we can do that, but maybe we can change something else,’” Kuczmik remembers telling his colleagues at SWU. “We called [SWU] for a co-creation process and they said the typical accident is a car from the right side at the front, because it’s turning to the left. They [typically] change the complete front skirt instead of only the small, damaged part. So, we split the front skirt into three pieces, with a lot of small fixtures added for the cable of the day running light. Now, the customer only has to change one third of the complete front skirt [in the event of a collision].”

“AM is a big improvement for our industry.”

Both of these applications have been additively manufactured using Fused Deposition Modelling (FDM) technology: the armrest with a ‘low-cost’ polymer and the front skirt components with a high-performance polymer boasting the ‘highest level of fire retardancy’, ‘more mechanical properties’ and the ability to endure ‘very high wind loads.’

Siemens hasn’t just limited its adoption of 3D printing for rail spare parts to polymer or FDM, however. The company has also invested in metal powder bed fusion technology and is producing spare parts in aluminum and stainlesssteel materials. “There’s no limit in respect of safety, if we do everything in terms of approval,

material properties, qualification and so on, in the right way,” says Kuczmik.

Metal 3D printing was deployed at Hamburger Hochbahn last year when a suspension bracket of a DT4 brake calliper was replaced with an additively manufactured version that received approval by the component manufacturer, rail operators and corresponding certification bodies.

Functioning in a similar way to the conventional component with an adequate level of safety, the stainless-steel suspension bracket has been designed to deflect the braking forces away from the brake calliper unit into the bogie frame, meaning it must withstand a braking force equivalent to several tons. During testing, it was exposed to a strain of more than 25 tons and demonstrated a lifespan of 45 years, with Siemens now in the process of suggesting the part to Deutsche Bahn and outher European customers.

Having taken the calculated risk to invest in AM for this endeavor back in 2013, Siemens Mobility, through the additive manufacture of 13,000 spare parts from 1,300 certified designs, continues to guide and direct its customers to significant cost savings via quicker turnaround times. Along the way, and thousands of times since they embarked, parts have not just been replaced but they’ve been improved. For Siemens Mobility, the impact AM is having in the rail sector is palpable.

“I think there’s a lot of expectations on these technologies because additive manufacturing seems to be something of a lighthouse in our industry," Kuczmik finishes. "We have a lot of vehicles, a lot of different designs, a lot of problems on obsolescence: the parts can’t be delivered anymore. And with very low quantities, additive manufacturing seems to be a tool to solve this issue. It’s a big improvement for our industry.”

VOL 6 ISSUE 4 / www.tctmagazine.com / 013

LEADING THE WA WORDS: Sam Davies

F

lorence, Talamone, Celle, Aberdeen, Houston, Kariwa and Dhahran.

These are the seven locations in which Baker Hughes has deployed additive manufacturing centers of excellence. Just seven years ago, it had none.

While 2020 has seen the company harness its additive capability to address medical and PPE shortages as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, 2019 was a year of significance, for it qualified as many end-use additively manufactured components as the previous five combined. Baker Hughes now has a collection of more than 450 qualified parts which, altogether, have been additively manufactured over 25,000 times.

“Without question,” Dr. Mikhail Gladkikh, the company’s Global Technology and Operations Leader for the Additive Services Growth Venture, says, “we are the leader in the area for oil and gas on functional additive manufacturing applications.”

That industry leadership, exhibited through its myriad downhole and turbomachinery applications, stems from those seven facilities.

Each houses teams of additive manufacturing specialists and invites engineers from the company’s various product lines to share knowledge, technology and insights, and ultimately leverage additive to solve problems across the business.

Gladkikh describes the centers as ‘catalysts for additive implementation.’ In Aberdeen, the additive team is focused on oil field equipment applications, while the two centers in Italy primarily serve Baker Hughes’ turbo engine endeavors. Around 50% of the effort exerted in Houston is on the additive

manufacture of parts, with a focus also being placed on process and materials development, which occur hand in hand.

The Dhahran facility is primarily an R&D center and houses Saudi Arabia’s first industrial metal additive manufacturing system, installed last year. One application to come out of this facility is a Rock Lock backup ring, which was redesigned for an additive process to permit a packer expansion range, meaning the part can now run operations in a wider range of wellbore sizes. The design of this part would not be possible with traditional technologies.

Back in 2013, Baker Hughes’ first printed component was a core holding barrel for downhole applications, with fuel nozzles for turbomachinery being additively manufactured around the same time. Over the years, the application of 3D printing has expanded right across the business; rapid prototyping and jigs and fixtures made up most of the early use cases, but end-use parts materialized in gas turbines, compressors, downhole tools and in Baker Hughes’ measurement and sensor product lines too.

“In oil and gas, it is a high mix, low volume type of play,” Gladkikh says. “That’s why additive is perfect because you can design and manufacture parts economically for a load of one – sometimes that’s what we have to do. There’s lots of very simple components that don’t make sense for additive, but there are also lots of complex assemblies, like hydraulic manifolds or different types of completion equipment, where additive makes a lot of sense. This is where additive is best; where we can not only cut lead time because of the process or supply chain approach, but we

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5 ABOVE:

BAKER HUGHES ADDITIVE MANUFACTURING ENGINEER

can also redesign and improve functional performance because additive allows us to open up the design envelope and make possible solutions that were impossible before with conventional.”

Unlocking these possibilities is to take Baker Hughes’ application of 3D printing to the next level. Not only does the company want to reduce weight, componentry and cost, but it also wants to leverage the technology to keep components operational and keep operations running.

Right now, out in the field, drilling deep down into the Earth’s surface, is a proof of concept drill bit manufactured with a hybrid technique that teams 5-axis CNC milling and Direct Energy Deposition (DED). This drill bit is machined to a near net shape - because the volume of material needed ‘doesn’t make sense for additive’ - before the DED process adds 17-4PH stainless steel material to the blades with cutters inserted later. Typically, downhole drill bits like this are discarded after a few uses such is the wear and tear of the component, but utilising this hybrid approach and Baker Hughes’ scanning equipment lent from its inspection business,

HEAVY INDUSTRY

3 LEFT:

BAKER HUGHES METAL 3D PRINTED PARTS

regional manufacturer responsive. Baker Hughes is thus setting up an Emergency Services offering with 3D printing technology at the heart of production and 3D scanning again being deployed to reverse engineer parts once a ‘design triage’ process is carried out. This service will work to actively reduce physical inventory, a concept already in action at Baker Hughes, as well as facilitate local manufacturing, producing parts as close as possible to the point of need.

“If a plant or asset is down, the cost of downtime is a lot more than the cost of printing that spare part; this is where we add a lot of exponential value, we can quickly utilize our capabilities in 3D scanning, reverse engineering and design for additive, and print those spare parts,” Gladkikh explains.

SHOWN: INSIDE BAKER HIGHES TALAMONE FACILITY

the company will restore the drill bit to its original shape by adding material on to the existing substrate and redeploy the component.

“If you have an obsolete part, you need to understand what the functional performance of that part is,” Gladkikh explains, “and sometimes that is going to be damaged. You need to use your engineering skills and engineering first principles to restore it back to make sure that it performs the function that it was designed for.

With [this hybrid process], you can restore it back to that shape or you can also think about how we can improve the shape, so it performs that functional role better.”

“In oil and gas, it's a high mix, low volume type of play. That's why additive is perfect.”

This process is set to be applied to a host of drill bit products across the Baker Hughes business, with the company also able to deposit 316 stainless steel, Inconel 17 and tungsten carbide using that hybrid technique. While 3D printing has the capability to restore these components to be re-used, there are many occasions where parts need to be completely replaced in order to keep operations moving.

Gladkikh says many Baker Hughes customers face losses of hundreds of thousands of dollars a day when a spare part is required but neither the inventory is adequately stocked nor the

Baker Hughes is enjoying this added value to an industry-leading extent. Hundreds of parts printed thousands of times have been qualified to the same requirements as thousands more conventionally manufactured components. The company is not just redesigning existing parts to reduce the weight and cost, but also looking to reduce waste through the restoration of existing components and streamline the supply chains of itself and customers. This across several continents and dozens of countries. And there’s more to come.

“We definitely see additive as a core competency and as one of the key technologies for the future. Together with machine learning and edge computing, this will take energy forward and we’re at the forefront,” Gladkikh says before adding: “But we need to see more robust machines, bigger sized machines and more material variety.

We need to automate to minimize powder handling, we need to fully take advantage of that design freedom capability and we’re working with some of our digital partners, such as ANSYS and Autodesk, to use their suite of generative design technologies.

Another application we’re exploring, and we already have products where this is implemented, is multi-material. This opens up a whole new envelope. Another opportunity is smart devices, embedding sensors into the tools and products we’re additively manufacturing today, to truly transform the performance of those products.

“This is the future; this is where we’re going.”

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Much of the negative impact of making metal products is caused by the traditional “subtractive” methods we use to create them.

Around the world, fleets of big, strong machine tools remove, or subtract, metal from plates, rods and billets to sculpt millions of parts — creating tons of metal chips, toxic debris and pollution.

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At the same time, our 3D printers enable all-new lightweight designs that cannot affordably be manufactured with traditional subtractive methods. In fact, metal parts redesigned and 3D printed with our technology save about 30-40% of their original weight — for more efficient shipping, flying or driving.

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SUSTAINABILITY SPECIAL

SUSTAINABILITY Sponsored by

The hottest topic in AM right now, covered by the people who know most.

L

et’s put aside the political debates surrounding climate change and say that we should all do our bit. I, for instance, feel a great sense of achievement when I remember to wash and take a reusable cup to my local hipster coffee establishment. That was until I read a piece in Anthropocene Magazine by Pierre-Oliver Roy, which states: "It would take between 20 and 100 uses for a reusable cup to make up for the greenhouse gas emissions of a single-use cup. For ecosystem quality indicators, it could take more than 1,000 uses.”

Those paper cups, which we’ve come to know as the devil incarnate, only make up 5% of the total carbon footprint in a cup of coffee when you take into consideration plantation, oil jet fuel, energy to roast beans, energy to make the coffee etc.

There’s a comparison here to perceptions of additive manufacturing (AM) and sustainability.

While the prospect of utilizing less raw materials to manufacture a part seems, on the surface, to make complete carbon sense, the whole lifecycle of an additive manufactured part needs to be considered. How much electricity does an AM machine use for instance?

“26 is the magic number,” says Dr Phil Reeves, who in 2013 conducted a study on the very subject alongside the manufacturing trade association, GTMA. “A selective laser melting machine uses 26 times more electricity to process one kilo of titanium than a CNC machine would use to machine.”

Dr Reeves’ in-depth research, which focuses primarily on metal powder-bed fusion technology throws up so many questions that need to be asked before proclaiming additive manufacturing is in any way shape or form sustainable; even down to the location of manufacture. The report uses an aerospace bracket as an example, to produce it in Norway, where 99% of the electricity they produce is from renewable sources, you can say that there is no CO2 attributed to the manufacture. In India where 81% of electricity is made from fossil fuels and with their low grid efficiency, you can attribute 35 kilos of CO2 to the manufacture.

“If we can design better, more efficient products it will typically manifest itself as saving energy.”

“This idea of reshoring manufacturing with AM because it’s good for the environment, is all very well in practice, but actually the efficiency of your local power generation is more important than the efficiency of distribution,” explains Dr Reeves. “Although everyone has a bee in their bonnet about the contribution to global warming of shipping, if you look at it on a weight of goods moved by emissions per mile basis, it’s by far the most environmentally friendly mode of transport.”

If this all seems a little on the negative side, fear not, the findings clearly show some incredible upsides to AM’s potential impact on the environment. Particularly when it comes to utilizing titanium and aluminum powders for topologically optimized aerospace components.

The report takes into consideration the following elements for carbon footprint

analysis; raw materials, manufacture, distribution, use and disposal; it takes those aspects and compares an aluminum alloy component manufactured on a CNC, an additive manufactured latticed part and a topologically optimized AM part. The results are staggering, particularly when you take into account the weight saving benefits on fuel consumption in aviation. The lifecycle CO2 emissions for the latticed AM part equalled 16,260 kg, almost three times less when compared to the 43,886 kg from the CNC machined part.

“There’s another environmental benefit of AM, which is design functionality and improved performance,” says Dr Reeves.

“A processing plant project I worked on a couple years ago managed to improve the efficiency of a heat exchanger by 5%, which saved a couple of million pounds a year mainly from lowering electricity consumption. If we can design better, more efficient products it will typically manifest itself as saving energy.”

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Advertorial

Making Additive Manufacturing Sustainable: Ask the Right Question Additive Manufacturing provides companies with an instrument to manufacture in a more sustainable way – both socially and environmentally. As a result, many view AM as a positive force that helps companies to operate more sustainably. However, that’s simply not enough. Moving forward, the question is not whether AM is a sustainable manufacturing technology. The question becomes: what can we do to make AM more sustainable?

Additive Manufacturing has established itself as a powerful and sustainable manufacturing solution. The technology empowers people locally through decentralized production, it improves people’s health and well-being through personalized care, and it enables higher quality jobs. At the same time it supports a manufacturing process with less waste, through mass-personalization and optimized distribution.

But considering Additive Manufacturing a green technology simply because of the unique benefits that are inherent to the technology is, frankly, too easy.

Similarly, manufacturers of electric cars can’t claim to be sustainable simply because electric cars are generally considered better for the environment than traditional gaspowered cars.

That’s why a first step is for companies to organize themselves in a sustainable way, by considering the impact of their decisions on their workers, customers, suppliers, community, and the environment.

But in order to make truly significant contributions, companies need to

Materialise.com/mindware

invest in innovative technologies that help to advance their respective industries. For electric car manufacturers this may mean investing in a battery recycling network.

At the same time, we need to invest in optimizing the specific drivers that make it so unique, such as the ability to manufacture locally or the possibility to mass-customize products.

“The AM industry can and needs to do more,” says Fried Vancraen, founder and CEO of Materialise, “by developing new and innovative ways to reduce our impact on the societies we interact with and the environments we operate in. We recognize this and proudly develop innovative technologies to reduce our impact – from reducing scrap rates and increasing the usage of recycled powder to creating the workplaces of the future.”

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At Materialise we believe that continued investment in innovative technologies is key to establish Additive Manufacturing as a truly sustainable manufacturing technology. New innovations will help to reduce the negative impact of the technology, including waste and energy consumption.

By better understanding the process and increasing our ability to control it, we can make Additive Manufacturing more sustainable.

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to publish our research findings and share them with our members, the AM industry, and the public at large.

AM’s first sustainability focused trade association on their plans to enhance AM’s environmental impact.

W

hile the economic and technical superiority of additive manufacturing (AM) is wellknown within key industries, its sustainability benefits are often less wellunderstood. For this reason, the Additive Manufacturer Green Trade Association (AMGTA) was launched last year at Formnext, with a mission to promote the environmental benefits of AM over traditional manufacturing. The AMGTA is a global and unaffiliated nonprofit organization, open to any additive manufacturer or industry stakeholder that meets certain criteria relating to sustainability of production or process.

There are several positive environmental benefits of the additive manufacturing process when compared to traditional manufacturing; most notably there is considerably less waste in AM. Existing research on sustainability in AM tends to focus either on material waste, energy use, or machine emissions to manufacture a part.

However, there is limited published research

that considers life-cycle assessment (LCA) - a comparative study of the environmental impact a part or product has throughout the stages of its life from cradle to grave.

The AMGTA is hoping to address this lack of real research by commissioning studies that include LCAs, which will analyze a part at each phase of its life from raw material extraction, processing, manufacturing, transportation, use, and disposal. This research will determine at a granular level by what amount AM is an environmentally improved manufacturing process. Our first LCA will focus on traditional casting versus powder-bed fusion additive manufacturing.

Sustainability cannot be achieved in a silo. For sustainability to transition from wishful thinking to impactful results, we will need to partner with industry players along the value chain and beyond.

Company leadership needs to consider many stakeholders as they develop their sustainability goals and objectives, including employees, customers, vendors, suppliers, communities, government, non-profit organizations, certification entities, educational institutions, and other constituents.

Through rigorous, independent, and ongoing research, the AMGTA serves as a key industry resource positioned to help our members rise to the challenge of sustainability in AM. The AMGTA plans

Sustainability in AM is gaining momentum as more companies strive to improve their eco-footprint.

Visionary industry leaders are constantly challenging their employees to find new ways to reduce waste by repurposing or recycling used material, improving the manufacturing environment for their workforce, lessening the distance parts and products travel, finding innovative ways to use new materials including bio-renewables, and other creative solutions to becoming more sustainable. These important initiatives have led to an increase in value-added parts, products, and services. By commissioning and publishing rigorous new research in the field of sustainability and AM, the AMGTA intends to augment and facilitate these continued efforts by industry leaders.

We all witnessed during the COVID-19 pandemic how supply chain disruptions and logistical hurdles were countered with print-on-demand efficiencies, shared CAD files and other resources, as well as the leveraging of community relationships to provide critical PPE such as face shields, testing swabs, and medical equipment parts to hospitals and health care facilities locally and worldwide. Just as the AM industry harnessed the passion of its employees to tackle the challenges presented by the coronavirus to make a difference and save lives, we can also advance sustainability in AM to save our planet.

This resilient industry has learned how to leverage AM in ways that we have never seen before. As the AM industry continues to grow, we will continue to iterate and evolve.

We are well positioned to advance sustainability in the AM industry to improve our collective environmental impact globally.

VOL 6 ISSUE 4 / www.tctmagazine.com / 019

THOUGHTS FROM INDUSTRY LEADERS We’ve spoken to some of the industry’s leading lights and asked what sustainability means to them.

ELLEN KULLMAN | CEO | CARBON The old adage of reduce, reuse, recycle is as relevant today as it was decades ago when it came up and hopefully we’re doing a better job at it today […]. With every print there is resin left over, so we reclaim as much of it as we can and we reuse in the next print. That was a change from the firstgeneration printer because we understand that’s not only an economic issue for our customers, it’s a sustainability issue for our customers as well.

DR AARON BENT | CEO | 6K

FRIED VANCRAEN FOUNDER AND CEO | MATERIALISE We are proud that we defined, from the opening reception of Materialise, our mission statement that we wanted to use our knowhow in 3D printing for a better and a healthier world [...] We see this just as an extension of an evolution we have been in already for a long time because sustainability is now another word to define that better and healthier world.

MARIE LANGER | CEO | EOS What is really important for me is to better communicate the advantages we have in this technology when it comes to conventional manufacturing. So many advancements like new resource efficiencies, lightweight design, longer product life, inventory waste reduction, a lot of things that we can offer with the technology in general. I want to make everyone more aware of the fact that it can be a green technology and then of course, there are a lot of things we look into either biodegradable materials [or] making sure that we reduce energy waste of our machines.

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MAX LOBOVSKY | CO-FOUNDER AND CEO | FORMLABS I think the long-term impact that additive can make is around this idea of distributed manufacturing, a little bit of what we saw with some of this COVID production, where rather than centralized production in a couple of places and shipping things around the world, you can produce things locally on-site, reduce those transportation impacts on the environment and increase efficiency by having less waste.

Additive is known for being a more sustainable process than conventional manufacturing, however a deeper look into supply chain shows that significant improvements can be made. The most common method for producing metal powder is a highenergy, low-yield gas atomization process which is bad for our planet.

It has a poor environmental footprint and is burdened by 75% waste – due to only 25% of material being produced at a usable size for LPBF as an example. Seeing the potential for huge environmental improvements was a key driver for 6K in turning to the production of AM powders.

In contrast to gas atomization, 6K’s UniMelt microwave plasma process leverages a host of feedstock materials derived from sustainable sources such as certified scrap CNC turnings, over-sized GA and even AM supports or failed builds, that would otherwise find their way to landfill.

Additionally, UniMelt uses significantly less gas, our yield is near 100% of the desired powder size and is tunable to match the different AM technologies.

The combination of a better carbon footprint, extremely high-yield and use of sustainable sources has really caught the attention of large AM super-users across various industries as they recognize that 6K is helping to drive the circular economy.”

SUSTAINABILITY Sponsored by

VICKI HOLT | CEO | PROTOLABS I am passionate about sustainability. I believe that the answers to problems we've got around climate change are going to come from technologies and it's going to become from companies collaborating together to find these solutions. I’ve been very inspired by how companies have come together in this pandemic and it tells me we can solve problems around climate change and focus on sustainability.

XAVIER MARTÍNEZ FANECA CEO | BCN3D The move from traditional manufacturing to additive manufacturing with the use of thermoplastics in FFF technology is a more sustainable way of producing as it eliminates the CO2 emissions associated with transporting plastic parts. At BCN3D we manufacture locally at our Barcelona headquarters, thus reducing the massive imports of parts from our 3D printers and we also produce our own parts on our machines at our own 3D Printing Farm. By manufacturing locally we can recycle and extend the life of products resulting in more efficient use of fuel and reducing greenhouse gas emissions and resource consumption.

At BCN3D we like to talk about 3D printing giving productive use to different plastic filaments and obviously we manage the waste generated appropriately, but we advocate a circular recycling process so that a more rational use of these materials can be reverted to society.

DROR DANAI | CBO | XJET

DAN SAWYER | BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT OFFICER | NATUREWORKS 3D The same aspects that make AM so useful: distributed manufacturing, low volume production, and customized/ complex designs with a wide and growing variety of materials make collection, re-use and recycling more challenging. Collaborating to use sustainably-sourced, renewable raw materials and creating after-use markets for recovered materials can drive us in the right direction.

It’s true that we often cite the environmental benefits of additive because its less wasteful than subtractive manufacturing and due to the ease of local production.

However, we need to start looking at the whole picture, every stage of the process. Waste of material still happens, there are a lot of systems using support structures or in powderbased technology a lot of powder goes to waste. With some processes there’s a whole infrastructure required around the AM system itself, powder supply systems, de-powdering units, filtering and anti-static systems etc.

– of course personal safety is an absolute must – but it all contributes to the environmental footprint.

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PICTURE PERFECT

As machine sales within the CONTEXT market research-defined Design Class (20,000-100,000 USD) struggled during early 2020, a new machine launch by Stratasys attempts to buck the trend.

A

dditive manufacturing (AM) is arguably the manufacturing technology with the most significant range in prices.

To help those outside of the industry understand how diverse it is, it’s important to stress that you can pay one hundred dollars for a machine or you could spend one million, and there’s everything in between.

Market research defines that everything in between as Design Class this includes (but is not limited to) machines like Sintratec’s S1, Markforged’s X5, BigRep’s Studio G2, Xact Metal’s XM200C… a range as diverse as the industry itself.

One machine that has snuck in under that umbrella with a bit of “we’re sub 100,000 USD” marketing is the 99,000 USD Stratasys J55. Its launch was scheduled for this year’s RAPID + TCT but the postponement of that show wasn’t going to quell a project that the elder statesmen of AM were quite confident could shake the foundations of design validation 3D printing. Like any good marketing team, the Stratasys incumbents turned the threat into an opportunity, with a huge virtual launch of the machine.

Whether Stratasys intended to ensure the machine did fit into the Design Class pricing structure created by CONTEXT or not, it certainly wouldn’t be a hindrance to have it described as such to one of the machine’s key target markets – industrial product design.

"Where most designers are spending most of their time is in this middle stage, this detailed design,” Gina Scala, Director of Marketing, Global Education told TCT at the time of the launch. “This is where you are really honing the aesthetics and the function of the product. Here, it's all about color, material finish, the fit, feel and function also come in. Designers are producing the most models at this stage.

Therefore, they need to do it rapidly. They need to get feedback, apply the feedback.

What we found is if we compare this to traditional methods, really sending these models out to a model shop, the J55 allows these parts to be produced 79% quicker internally."

TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE?

Without the trade show comfort of being able to see and touch parts made from the machine and have its quality validated from those TCT Expert Advisory Board Members we usually see floating around a RAPID + TCT show floor, it has been difficult to separate hyperbole from true innovation.

With a 478,000-color gamut on a machine that takes up under half a square metre of floor space at around a third of the cost of enterprise-class PolyJet systems, the J55’s specs almost look too good to be true.

However, according to Kinetic Vision, a multi-disciplined design consultancy that lists 50 of the Fortune 100 as its clients, the J55 more than lives up to its billing. Kinetic Vision is acutely aware of 3D printing, operating several Ultimakers as well as an early forerunner of the J55’s PolyJet technology via an Objet machine, but when their industrial designers first got hold of the J55 as a BETA customer they were blown away.

“At the price point with the capabilities that it offers, there has been nothing like the J55 in the industry,” Aerin Shaw, Marketing and Partnership Lead at Kinetic Vision told TCT. “Achieving Pantone colors with little post-processing has forced a complete rethink of how we 3D print.

We can now conceive of a product on a Monday, have it designed by end of day Monday, printed overnight and have a picture-perfect model delivered to the client by Tuesday lunch. We've never been able to do that before.”

The J55 can print simultaneously with five color materials, plus a sixth for printing supports, enabling nearly 500,000 colors plus transparencies and textures using VeroClear material. While it doesn't offer

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the multi-material capabilities of its bigger sister J series enterprise systems, what is does provide is a new patented rotating build platform with fixed print head, which is said to maximize reliability and machine footprint (the machine offers a max build volume of 22 litres) while also significantly reducing operational noise to a level similar to that of a home refrigerator.

For Lyle James, Group Manager of the Innovation and Industrial Design group at Kinetic Vision, the J55 has not only fitted seamlessly into the workflows but consolidated them: “We use it for a variety of projects including both internal design evaluation and final presentation models, which traditionally we’d use separate machines and separate processes for.

As a design firm, one of the challenges to any project is to assess the level of finish that would be appropriate for any given phase.

Budget is a driver for that; if you're talking about assessing a variety of color at an internal validation stage it’s not always possible to go to the extent of painting and finishing parts, the J55 is eliminating the budgetary constraints for us in the middle of the project.”

APPLICATION = COST JUSTIFICATION

CONTEXT’S most recent report written for TCT stated: “Key end-markets for Design price class printers, such as jewellery and dental businesses, were all but shut down across the globe, severely impacting demand for new machines[…] This resulted in -37% fewer Design printers shipping in Q1 2020 than in the same period of the previous year.”

Design Machinery

SHOWN: FULL SPEAKER MODEL PRODUCED ENTIRELY ON J55

SHOWN:

THE J55 HAS A COLOR GAMUT OF ALMOST 500,000 COLORS

“At the price point, with the capabilities that it offers, there has been nothing like the J55.”

What Stratasys is setting out to achieve with the aggressive J55 pricing, is to unlock applications in industrial product design that would previously have required an investment in Industrial machinery (+100,000 USD).

Despite the positive feedback and what would appear on the surface to be great value for money, CONTEXT’s report for TCT does fear for the market of both Industrial and

Design Class machinery in this current climate: “The impact of COVID-19 on key vertical markets for Industrial and Design printers was still severe in the second quarter and, with fears of a resurgence of the virus continuing to affect the decisions such businesses are making about capital expenditure, the trough in demand will, potentially, be more prolonged.

While increases may take a while to materialize, forward-thinking companies are expecting a U-shaped recovery in printer shipments and are already betting on a future demand surge.”

With the J55 machines not shipping until Q3 and a suite of features that we’ve previously associated with much more expensive technology, it appears Stratasys may be at the forefront of that surge.

SHOWN: PARTS FROM THE J55 REQUIRE LESS POSTPROCESSING THAN OTHER POLYJET METHODS

VOL 6 ISSUE 4 / www.tctmagazine.com / 023

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3 LEFT:

PHOTOCENTRIC’S MAGNA 3D PRINTER FARM

6 BELOW:

FACE SHIELDS 3D PRINTED WITH PHOTOCENTRIC’S LCD TECHNOLOGY

T

he COVID-19 pandemic has proved a divisive one for the additive manufacturing (AM) industry. While some businesses have seen staff reductions and a downturn in sales, there are others who would argue, with a reasonable hesitation, that the pandemic has actually had a positive impact on the adoption and perception of the technology.

A recent report by market intelligence company CONTEXT revealed that while almost every category of AM hardware took a dip in sales, the professional 3D printing market, which accounts for machines costing between 2.5K-20K USD, grew by 17% from 2018 to 2019, a trend which has continued in recent months as work from home scenarios invigorated purchases of compact professional systems for remote usage.

For UK-based Photocentric, a photopolymer 3D printing specialist whose large-format LCD Screen printers fall just within that Professional sweet spot, the last few months have provided an opportunity to scale-up its high-volume 3D printer farm ambitions fuelled by an order of 7 million protective face shields for the NHS. “We produce everything here, which is one of our big advantages,” Photocentric’s 3D Development Engineer Ed Barlow tells TCT from the farm on an exclusive virtual tour. “While the whole world was shut down for COVID we had the great opportunity, given that we make our own chemicals, […] we formulate our own resins in house with our own chemistry team, we build our own printers with UK stock, […] we had all the bits we required to build this farm behind me and it allowed us to do this in a matter of a few weeks.”

Bringing everything in-house, the company was able to iterate the mask design 23 times, build a farm of over 36 machines (so far), and ramp up manufacturing for 350,000 face shields each week including post-processing and assembly. At the time of writing, the company has surpassed production of 2.5 million face shields.

WHAT NOW?

Temporarily switching 3D print capacities over to PPE production is, however, a short-term solution, evidenced in the recent closure of Voodoo Manufacturing’s Brooklyn 3D print farm which had leveraged its desktop FDM machines to assist in the COVID-19 fight. For other users who purchased professional machines as a result of COVID, whether prompted by work from home scenarios or similar PPE manufacturing efforts, the next challenge is how to repurpose that technology going forward.

In a recent panel hosted by MakerBot, CEO Nadav Goshen suggested that companies are now being encouraged to challenge their supply chain legacies, heavily impacted by the pandemic, with additive alternatives, and according to CONTEXT’s Chris Connery, the demand for professional systems is expected to remain.

“Difficult economies and a lot of the key industries that 3D printing currently caters to still have some difficulty ahead,” Connery explained. “Once we get past

all that we do believe that this install base of professional machines, this next generation of engineers who are sequestered at home are going to be the management and CEOs of the next generation and they would have become familiar with additive manufacturing.”

For Photocentric, the success of the Magna farm has been a proof point for 3D printing’s potential in mass manufacturing and what Barlow says will be “many more Magna farms in many different industries going forward.”

“Coronavirus has given us a means to rapidly scale up what we we've always intended to do, which is custom mass manufacture," Barlow said. "This Magna farm is the first of many.

It's something that we are rolling out as a company strategy going forward, much bigger production lines with 3D printing at its heart.”

Some of those other industries are already starting to materialise. Photocentric recently mobilised a new research group for the lowcost mass manufacture of battery electrodes which exploit 3D printing’s geometric freedom.

While this specific venture isn’t a direct result of its COVID activity, it exemplifies the flexibility of professional AM systems in a diverse range of manufacturing scenarios.

Barlow adds: “What we've managed to do is scale and build a long-lasting model that's competitive with many of these technologies going forward, not just in the short scale of the Coronavirus challenge.”

VOL 6 ISSUE 4 / www.tctmagazine.com / 025

April 26-29, 2021

McCormick Place, Chicago, IL

For 30 years, the additive manufacturing community has helped shape RAPID + TCT into North America’s most vital event, where world-renowned American ingenuity drives the adoption and advancement of the technology.

Stay tuned this fall as we announce our best lineup yet. The world’s most influential technology leaders and innovators will share their expertise and inspire your next big move in additive.

VISIT RAPID3DEVENT.COM TO LEARN MORE

AREVO'S FRAMEWORK

CONSUMER

WORDS: SAM DAVIES

I

n a research and development lab in Milpitas, California, a composite electric moped circles the room it was thought up in, printed in, painted in, finished and fully assembled in, while a chair with a similar upbringing sits one of Arevo’s many engineers on the workshop’s outskirts.

The moped, which went from concept to working vehicle in under four and a half weeks, and the chair, created in even less time, were produced with the additive manufacturing firm’s continuous carbon fiber 3D printing technology, but may never see the light of day.

One is merely the exploits of the freedom within Arevo to be inventive and imaginative and drew a disbelieving laugh from recentlyappointed CEO Sonny Vu, while the other was a serious endeavor, before the company turned its attention to a more immediately attainable product. Arevo believes itself to be an entrepreneurial company that experiments with liberty, ‘takes chances’ and is full of people who ‘forego a comfortable life for one of exploration.’ It lives by the notion that, like a blind squirrel looking for nuts, amongst the many bad ideas it has, a good one will eventually be stumbled upon.

A prime example of these efforts is the composite Superstrata e-bike and bicycle models, which generated more than 3 million USD worth of pre-orders in the first two weeks and over 6 million USD by midSeptember.

Both bikes are to be manufactured ondemand in their thousands – the money raised via Indiegogo would equate to more than 3,000 e-bikes or 4,000 standard bikes at early bird prices – and be shipped from December through to 2021. Each unibody bike frame is to be customized per the height, weight, shirt and trouser measurements of the user and produced at a rate of two per machine per day with Arevo’s composite 3D printing equipment.

“This is going to transform manufacturing.”

Arevo’s patented approach sees a six-axis robot deposit a carbon fiberreinforced thermoplastic filament which has been heated through a laser source and compressed into substrate layers. This process is said to eliminate voids inside and between layers at any angle or direction.

The decision to use thermoplastic material instead of thermoset material, like most other composite bike frame manufacturers, has been inspired by the aerospace industry’s switch to take advantage of the superior impact

resistance, with Arevo less interested in lightweighting the products as it is adding durability.

In addition to the material’s properties, the unibody frame being manufactured in a single piece means there are no welding seams or bolts, while generative design software allows Arevo to produce a mesh of carbon fiber, implementing strength in all three dimensions, and optimize where the fibers are laid to apply strength properties only where it is needed. Not wanting to be profligate with its resources, Arevo has also moved away from using PEEK because, as Vu puts it, “you don’t need heat resistance for your bike – by the time it melts you were dead 300 degrees ago.”

What has been deemed necessary, though, is the utmost care and precision.

Within 500,000 variations, the bike frame is to be customized to the user’s clothing measurements, while also factoring in riding style and wheel choice, and each product is to be hand finished and put through a Finite Element Analysis process before shipping.

That delivery phase will commence at the end of 2020 – three years after an initial concept was developed, two years after Arevo started working on an electric version and a year after prototypes of both had been completed and iterated. The speed at which the pre-orders of the Superstrata bikes came flooding in spoke to the popularity of the products, and proved to Vu and his colleagues that their trust in 3D printing and a freedom to innovate has been wellplaced.

“Ninety-nine per cent of all ideas, including the ones we come up with, are bad. You only need one good one but imagine if you had to set up 100 different manufacturing lines just to find out.

That’s the beauty of additive manufacturing,” Vu told TCT. “This is why I joined this company. I just thought this is going to completely transform manufacturing.”

VOL 6 ISSUE 4 / www.tctmagazine.com / 027

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RE-DESIGNING EDUCATION

Words: Peter Gough, MSc, MSc Industrial Digitalisation Programme Leader, Department of Engineering Postgraduate Taught Programmes Leader, and Senior Lecturer in Digital Innovation at PrintCity, Manchester Metropolitan University.

I

n the Summer of 2018, MMU played host to a collection of industry leaders as part of a factfinding session for a new course to gauge just what they wanted from new people they looked to employ. We wanted to build a totally new course that encouraged problem-solving, creativity, common sense and a mindset that was not afraid to try new ideas. Underneath this would be a foundation of softskills development on which to build communication and presentation skills that are essential, not only in this domain, but indeed for every business sector in the world.

The most viewed talk (66M views) on TED is Sir Ken Robinson's 'Do Schools Kill Creativity?'. He died this August but his legacy is one that made people stop and think about how we teach and what learning actually is. 'Rewiring Education'

by John D. Couch gives a more in-depth analysis of how we got to standardized tests at the cost of creativity and the arts.

We can sum it up in just three statements: Exploration replaced by expectation, collaboration replaced by competition and discovery replaced by memorization.

A famous US army recruiting slogan was 'Be all you can be' but with these standardized tests, they made you believe at an early age that you were already all you could be.

The late and great Douglas Adams had a great relationship with new technologies. He once defined technology as 'stuff that doesn't work yet' and 'anything that is in the world when you're born is normal'. Children born after June 29th 2007 will never know that smartphones were born with them, they are just normal to them but a real challenge for non-digital natives who struggle to get to grips with them. For a moment, imagine someone could not hear you but could see you. You make the 'call me' gesture with your outstretched

thumb and little finger but try this with a young person and they won't as readily understand as all their calls are made on a glass slab with no design similarity to a clunky old plastic telephone handset with the microphone and speakers at opposite ends.

So with that background for context, our MSc Industrial Digitalisation course was born. Even our admissions criteria changed. Generally, if you want to study Biology for example at university, you need previous entry qualifications in Biology. So what about Industrial Digitalisation? Limiting entry based on what people had done before can prevent them becoming anything else they could be. A class full of students from the same educational route is not one that is fertile with differing opinion and experience so we consider anyone from any course but interview rarely where we need to check suitability.

encouraged to make things but then be able to support and justify their decisions and manufacturing processes to others.

Knowing how you made something takes on a whole new value when you have to explain why you made it.

Around this, we strongly encourage our students to be unafraid of failure because, once again in the words of Sir Ken Robinson, 'if you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original'. When students vehemently defend a notion or idea and then back it up with logical reasoning, you know they're ready.

In the first year of the program, we were approached by a large sportswear company who agreed to fund a 12-month research project to investigate tennis shoes and ankle injuries in tennis. We put three students on this, one was an engineer, one was a product designer and the other was a business graduate.

Without any one of them, we could not have undertaken the project and we saw this as a clear vindication of our entry criteria - it worked. This amalgamation of different academic backgrounds has opened doors the other way too and we now have aspects of 3D printing embedded into programs around the university, from fashion to furniture design and architecture. Additive manufacturing is just one spoke in the wheel of our course but it provides the perfect vehicle for design, discovery, experimentation and collaboration.

We don't do exams; we use problembased assessments where students are

VOL 6 ISSUE 4 / www.tctmagazine.com / 029

ON TOP FORM Formlabs Co-founder and CEO Max Lobovsky discusses the desktop SLA leader's growth, new dental platform and long-awaited Fuse 1.

F

ormlabs has come a long way from a Kickstarter success story to one of a handful of ‘unicorn’ AM companies. Can you talk about the biggest changes or shifts that you've seen in the industry in that time?

I think since we've been involved in the industry, we've seen a few different sort of waves of excitement, and, dare I say hype, pass through the industry. When we got started, people were really excited about the idea of mass consumer 3D printing, of a printer in everyone's home. In fact, we were kind of mistaken for being a mass consumer focused product in the beginning, even though if you go back to our original Kickstarter, the first word on the page is “professional” - we've always been focused on professional users. But that wave kind of came and went and then I think the next big wave, which we're still sort of in the middle of, is metal printing and then high-volume production printing. I think interest in 3D printing has been kind of steady throughout that time but which part people are focusing on has changed.

Formlabs came of age during that first wave how did you navigate that time to ensure that Formlabs was here for the long haul?

Well, to be honest, we've almost intentionally ignored whatever was currently hyped up in 3D printing and stayed focused always on what is the most value we can deliver, get into actual customers hands, get parts printed. That's where we're always putting the majority of our effort. I think that the reality is things have developed, in some ways, slower than people expected but also in different ways. A lot of what we spend time on, it's a little bit harder to explain upfront why it's exciting, but in the end, results in more printers in more people's hands than anything else, and that’s focusing on the accessibility and reliability. You know, we put a lot of work into, 'can we make a printer that you can buy in a box, take out, get up and running and get good parts out within minutes?' And that's something that no one else is

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5 ABOVE:

MAX LOBOVSKY, FORMLABS CEO

“If you went back and looked at the thousand customers on Kickstarter, you’ll probably find one of almost every type of customer we have today.”

Executive INSPEXQ&A

really doing quite as well but has resulted in us shipping more professional 3D printers than anyone else in the market.

Has your customer base changed at all? Have any surprised you?

5 ABOVE:

DENTAL MODELS PRINTED ON THE FORM 3BL

6 BELOW:

PARTS PRINTED ON FORMLABS' LARGEFORMAT SYSTEM

It's definitely evolved. We were focused generally on professionals from the beginning but we did have some amount of hobbyist customers and we still have some today. I think if you went back actually and looked at the thousand customers on Kickstarter, you’ll probably find one of almost every type of customer we have today. But one segment that grew quite a bit since then is dental, which has become a large chunk of our sales today, not the majority, but an important segment. That's something we knew was an important part of the market, especially for stereolithography type printers but we weren't ready to tackle in the early days because you need a higher level of reliability and service and feature completeness of the product to be relevant in that market. Since we built that out over the years, that's become an important segment. The other piece that's grown is various types of kind of higher volume production. Some of that's in dental but recently we had this COVID example and a variety of other customers in different industries that are using our printer to make thousands, hundreds of thousands of parts per year.

You’ve just launched the latest iteration of your Form 3 technology and begun shipping the larger Form 3L – can you talk to us about that that platform?

A lot of the reason we developed Low Force Stereolithography is to be able to scale up these inverted type SLA systems that we build into larger areas. Typically, they're only used for smaller build areas and they don't compete with the kind of large-format, right side up type SLA systems and that's because more force is applied to the part and the larger the part gets, you have these large cross sectional areas that you need to deal with. So, we were able to really use the same technology that's in the Form 3, and in a pretty straightforward way, build it into a larger system. This is letting us do what we did to the smaller format SLA market to the larger format market, where today, you can't really get a large-format professional system for less than $100,000 to $200,000 range. We're introducing something for about $10,000 and that's a dramatically different price point that's going to make big high-resolution parts accessible to many more people.

This latest announcement includes a new dental focused system, the Form 3BL. Can you talk more about why dental has become such an important focus area?

In the last few years, it sort of became possible for even an individual dental practice to do the scanning, software and printing and for us to make that possible and to be successful in that market, we had to adapt a lot because in general, we're kind of oriented as a horizontal technology company where we make a piece of technology that can be applied to many different applications and we kind of focus on doing our piece of the puzzle well, but in dental customers expect much more of a complete system. They don't want a general-purpose tool, they want to do something very specific with it and they want a tool that's built to meet those needs and they want a company that can understand those applications and serve them well.

Are there any updates you can give us on the Fuse 1 SLS technology and maybe the challenges around bringing this type of industrial process to the desktop space?

What we set out to do with SLS, again, same thing we did to SLA, we wanted to make it far cheaper and far easier to use. SLS systems are some of the most powerful but most expensive and difficult to use systems out there. You typically find them in a dedicated facility with dedicated engineers or technicians operating them and that meant that total sales of SLS machines a couple years ago was like less than 1,000 per year. Before that, an SLS installation started at around $200,000 for a full setup and we wanted to bring something to market around $20,000. It has taken us a lot longer than we would like or we expected but we are very close and made a lot of progress since our first announcements. I think what we found is that SLS is an even more complex process; the machines fundamentally have more actuators and sensors, and kind of tighter control required to get good parts out than you see with SLA […] Combined with the fact that we couldn't start with a Form 1 again, we couldn't start with a Kickstarter, more experimental focused product, we needed to get to something that's really reliable and works out of the box. That also took us longer to refine but we're basically there now. We've got beta machines in the field that have been running for months, producing good parts for customers and we will be bringing that product to market soon.

LISTEN TO THE INTERVIEW IN FULL: mytct.co/MaxFormlabs

VOL 6 ISSUE 4 / www.tctmagazine.com / 031

TCT EAB COLUMN

WHAT THE HECK AM I DOING HERE?

Nora Touré, Director, Sales and Service Factory Operations at Fast Radius and Founder of Women in 3D Printing, tells us why it’s wise to be prepared for AM to take you to unexpected places.

W

hen talking to customers over the phone or in-person, I am usually either sitting at my desk, in the comfort of my home, more generally in a meeting room, and sometimes in the customer’s factory.

Never, before working with Ivaldi Group, had I had to dress in a blue overall, wear security shoes, a security helmet, and literally climb 30 meters on a rusty non-rigid ladder in the middle of the sea to meet with a customer.

Never say never, right?

For some context around the following story: The year is 2018. I had joined Ivaldi Group a few months before and was on a “world tour”, from California to Mexico to Singapore, to meet the local teams as well as a few key customers. Arriving in Singapore, I knew meeting our customers and end-users there would be quite fun.

Ivaldi Group provides distributed manufacturing solutions to heavy industry, with a strong focus on maritime, oil & gas, mining, construction and automotive.

Singapore being the largest maritime hub in the world, I’m sure it’s easy to guess what kind of customers I was going to visit there.

So, here comes the day I get to make my first visit. I was excited, like a Christmas morning. Something I should share here is that I have always been fascinated by machines. When I was younger I would watch all the episodes of Mega Machines and Mighty Machines (not kidding, even though I’m not too vocal about this for some reason).

If you’ve already flown into Singapore, you’ve probably noticed the hundreds of vessels lined up in the port, some of them being a few miles away from the actual docks. That’s where I was headed - a few

032 / www.tctmagazine.com / VOL 6 ISSUE 4

miles away from the actual port. So, it takes a speed boat to get there. As fast as these boats are, it still takes roughly 30-40 minutes to get to the destination-vessel. In the meantime, I was already amazed by riding so close to these impressive beasts.

The closer we got, the more apprehension I felt. I kept looking at my security boots, my helmet and thick security gloves in my hands, starting to sweat from stress, excitement and overheating from being in tropical weather dressed like a winter-Smurf.

Finally, we get there and it’s go-time.

We were a team of three from Ivaldi, plus a couple of inspectors who are climbing such vessels almost every day. I was basically the newbie and EVERYONE watched me, from the captain of the speed boat, my team, the inspectors, to the crew on deck, 30 meters or so above. No pressure.

As I (literally) jumped from the small boat to the ladder of the HUGE

vessel (longer than the height of the Eiffel Tower by the way), and started my endless ascension, I kept repeating the last-minute instructions I had just received: “3-point contact, 3-pointcontact. What the heck am I doing here? Focus: 3-point-contact, 3-pointcontact…,” until I finally got there and fell into the welcoming arms of my team who were already up on the vessel.

I was tempted to order a cola and enjoy the view, but of course, we were there for a reason and only had a few hours to test the 3D printed parts we brought with us, gather feedback on already installed parts and meet our customers.

Oh, did I mention I was pregnant back then, too?

Bottom line is: you never know where meeting with customers will get you; always be ready for crazy, sensational adventures!

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