6 minute read
HANS LANGER X LIN KAYSER
HANS LANGER X
Two entrepreneurs with companies founded in Munich, Germany sit down to discuss the future of design and manufacturing.
In the first episode of a new Additive Insight Podcast series called Innovators on Innovators, EOS founder Hans Langer [HL] joined Hyperganic CEO Lin Kayser [LK] to offer insights on the developments and challenges surrounding the additive manufacturing (AM) industry today.
The below excerpt of the conversation touches on the pair’s beginnings in the 3D printing space, the development of a rocket engine application with EOS printing technology & Hyperganic’s software, and how they believe AM can emulate the development of the semiconductor space.
LK: I think one of the challenges that additive still has, most people still have that image in their minds that this is great for prototypes, etc, but it's nothing for serial production. It's too expensive, it's too slow, the material quality is not there. And these days are long gone. This is what fascinated me.
I've been doing software for 40 years now, and for me for the software was always one of the most creative things that you could do, software always moves fast, PC technology always moves fast. But the rest of the world cannot move very slowly. And I always ask myself, why is the rest of the world moving so slowly when I'm used to this incredible speed? The new PC is actually faster, and you can do more stuff and software just builds on top of each other, always improves. This seems not to be happening in the real world.
And when I got a 3D printer in 2012, I realized this is a tool where we can bring the software paradigm into manufacturing. Then I say, ‘okay Lin, you're kidding yourself,’ because I had this FDM printer which produced horrible parts. Then I discovered this whole world of industrial 3D printing, and that's where my eyes opened, I said, ‘wait a second, this has the potential to be the manufacturing method that we can use to create revolutionary parts.’ And now we need a software ecosystem for that. That was kind of my thinking that eventually started the idea for Hyperganic.
HL: I came out of the laser world, manufacturing with lasers. Parallel to EOS, we started SCANLAB, which is a world market leader today in laser-based digital manufacturing. This is far more than additive. Just to give you an idea, at EOS we use around 1,000 scan heads per year. But General Scanning is shipping 50,000 scan heads per year and companies like Foxconn, they use more than 10,000 of our systems just to manufacture iPhones. This gives you a little bit of perspective on where this thing could move. Foxconn still uses around 100,000 CNC machines. And when they got the order from Apple to manufacture the iPhone, they
SHOWN:
ROCKET ENGINE DESIGNED IN HYPERGANIC SOFTWARE
X LIN KAYSER
3LEFT:
EOS FOUNDER HANS LANGER
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HYPERGANIC CEO LIN KAYSER
purchased 5,000 CNC machines per quarter. I thought this is an interesting proposal for additive because an additive machine, at the end of the day, is much more functional than a CNC machine.
LK: I mean, I think that's one of the things that people often forget: manufacturing is so unbelievably big. You're very happy with the growth rates of additive at this time, we are very happy with the adoption of our software in the industry, but we're just scratching the surface of manufacturing at this point. Additive is like nothing, but I think we both believe very clearly that additive is going to play a huge role in manufacturing, it is going to play maybe the biggest role in manufacturing in the long run. That is of course a path, you have to go there.
And the interesting thing is that we both see this parallel between what happened in the production of computer technology, especially microchips, and what is now happening in additive. In microchips you had this very interesting combination of the software side that designed more and more advanced chips in a completely new way, in an algorithmic way and not in a manual way. And then on the other side, you had the evolution of the manufacturing process itself, finer details, improved structures, etc. And they evolved in combination, but each of them kind of separately, and each informed the other. But both of them could evolve independently, and that sped everything up. So, everything became much faster. And we are kind of seeing the same thing happening now in additive, would you agree with that?
HL: 100%. Because I had a highlight in, I think it was five years ago, I was reading the newspaper, and they were writing that [Qualcomm] had never manufactured a chip. It was reported that there was a chip company in Taiwan that had made the chips and I looked at Taiwan semiconductor manufacturing and I was very impressed with the semiconductor industry - and semiconductor for me is additive manufacturing, they do it layer by layer. Everybody is talking about additive manufacturing and is thinking this tiny market is additive manufacturing. Let's look at a similar market, the semiconductor industry, and just to give you an idea, I mean, this Taiwan semiconductor manufacturing today is worth 600 billion. 600 billion. And they started about the same time when EOS was started. And I said, maybe we can look at the development of this market in a comparable way.
And then I ask you a question because I didn't understand what the core of your software really was. It's a voxel-based system. And I'm a physicist, I always look to real results as real world. I mean, there is a digital world, but we have to make the transfer from the digital world into the real world. And this is always materials. You remember, we had this dinner at the restaurant near us, with my son, Uli. This was in 2018. And Uli said, ‘why don't we make a rocket engine part?’ and then then I said, ‘okay, Uli take care, we had created AM Ventures, we had a very ambitious team there with very specific knowledge between software and hardware’. And, we said, ‘let's rent an EOS machine and put the data from Lin on this machine.’ And this was not so easy, because the standard EOS interface didn't allow it. So, we created a special interface for you on this test machine and after 63 hours, I remember very well, we had a part in our hands that was created by a computer, and we had never seen a design of it before.
For me this was clear, now we are opening a new chapter. We are opening a new chapter that could probably develop like the one in the semiconductor industry, where we go into a totally different world.
The full Innovators on Innovators episode can be found at: http://mytct.co/AI-Langer-Kayser
