TCT North America 7.5 by TCT Magazine

AUTO & RAIL

SUSTAINABILITY

The latest AM applications in the transport sectors.

We ask the experts, how green is AM?

MAG NORTH AMERICAN EDITION VOLUME 7 ISSUE 5

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THIS IS AM 2.0 Desktop Metal on additive’s next level.

3D Printing & Additive Manufacturing Intelligence

VOLUME 7 ISSUE 5

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EDITORIAL

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FROM THE EDITOR

FROM THE EDITOR LAURA GRIFFITHS

Return to Form We got there in the end. After almost two years of planning, rescheduling and Meet-ing (in the Google sense), it felt good – and surprisingly normal – to be back at the NEC Birmingham this September for TCT 3Sixty. I can imagine it was a similar feeling for our partners in the U.S., and indeed those of you who were in attendance, just a few weeks prior when RAPID + TCT returned to Chicago.

Now we’re gearing up to do it all over again, this time with passports (both the travel and vaccine kind) in-hand, as the additive manufacturing (AM) industry descends on Frankfurt for a return to an in-person Formnext. TCT will be there to get you up to speed on the latest AM launches and developments promised by exhibitors on the show floor (if we can manage the step count after two years sat at home), and to present our annual TCT Conference @ Formnext and TCT Introducing stages. I think we can all agree, the opportunity to hear from and meet with high-level speakers and delegates after so many Zoom presentations and virtual meetings, is a welcome one. Just like at TCT 3Sixty, Senior Content Producer Sam Davies

and I will be taking the opportunity to get your feedback on what you’d like to see more or less of (it’s okay, we can take it) from TCT Magazine. Hopefully we’ve got it right over the following pages through our conversations with General Motors (Page 11), Deutsche Bahn (Page 14) and Wabtec (Page 17) on the use of AM in rail and automotive sectors; questioning the experts on AM’s green credentials (page 19); and exploring the rise of low-cost selective laser sintering platforms (page 27). If you’re joining us in Frankfurt, do drop by the TCT booth to grab a copy of the mag, and don’t forget to register in advance for your TCT Conference @ Formnext ticket to hear from experts at Boeing, GE Healthcare, Deutsche Bahn and Siemens Technology. It’s been a strange and challenging couple of years but I’m looking forward to getting back to events more regularly and safely and encourage you to go at your own pace. Hope to see you soon!

VOL 7 ISSUE 5 / www.tctmagazine.com / 03

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TCT VOLUME 7 ISSUE 5 Sustainability 19

COVER STORY

06. THIS IS AM 2.0

Desktop Metal details the significance of its multiple acquisitions as it looks to facilitate its AM 2.0 vision.

AutoMOTIVE & rail

09. THE FUNDAMENTALS

Kevin Baughey, Segment Leader, Transportation and Motorsports at 3D Systems, on “advancing the science” in automotive.

11. TOOLING UP

Senior Content Producer Sam Davies speaks to GM’s Malini Dusey about the automotive firm’s application of AM.

14. THE INSIDE TRACK

Stefanie Brickwede of Deutsche Bahn & Mobility goes Additive discusses 3D printing’s place in the rail industry.

17. BIG BRAKE

Head of Content Laura Griﬃths talks to Wabtec about the additive manufacture of a brake panel.

19. HOW GREEN IS AM?

Laura asks a number of industry experts for their thoughts on how sustainable additive manufacturing really is.

23. MINDFUL MANUFACTURING Stratasys’ Rosa Coblens discusses her new role as the company’s VP of Sustainability.

25. SOLUTIONS BY DESIGN

Hyperganic CEO Lin Kayser reinforces his belief that the key to addressing climate change lies in design innovation.

27 PROFESSIONAL AM 27. SMALL-FORMAT, BIG POTENTIAL

Sam talks to the vendors and users of small-format SLS to understand the opportunities and limitations of the technology.

CONSUMER PRODUCTS

30. REINVENTING CASUAL

Voxel8 and Hush Puppies discuss their 3D printed footwear collaboration.

Expert Column

32. REMEMBER THE MAGIC AND YOUR MEASUREMENTS ARKE Ltd consultant Robin Dallen explains why they still feel the magic of AM after more than a decade in the industry.

THIS IS AM W

hen Desktop Metal was featured on the cover of this very magazine last year and declared “bases loaded”, not even a global pandemic could curb the additive manufacturing (AM) company’s ambition.

SHOWN: PARTS PRINTED ON THE DESKTOP METAL PRODUCTION SYSTEM

First came the installations of its newly introduced Shop System, then a public listing on the New York Stock Exchange in a deal with Trine Acquisition Corp, and shortly after, the first of a series of bold acquisitions. In January, Desktop Metal brought EnvisionTEC into the fold in a milestone $300 million acquisition, and with it, nearly 20 years of experience in polymer AM as the originator of DLP technology. For those looking on, the foray into polymers may have seemed surprising, but if you ask Desktop Metal CEO and Co-founder Ric Fulop, the opportunities outside of metal have always been clear. “I've always believed there's a huge opportunity in composites and polymers,” Fulop told TCT. “We're in this segment of additive manufacturing that’s growing very fast and it's not tooling or prototyping - that's what's been done yesterday. It’s now all about mass production, competing with conventional manufacturing and changing the way people make things.” Fulop and team have labelled this new era of manufacturing, “Additive Manufacturing 2.0”, the next generation in 3D printing that’s about leveraging the power of AM at scale for mass production. Shattering the belief that AM only works for specialized, low volume applications, AM 2.0 promises to innovate on product, process and materials.

“It’s now all about mass production”

Desktop Metal’s growth strategy, which revolves around these three central pillars - printers, materials, and parts, is to offer a broad set of economic AM technologies that enable the company to compete cost-effectively with conventional manufacturing across a range of applications. The focus being on performance across material properties, surface finish, tolerances, and most critically, speed and cost. While Desktop Metal has continued to push hard on R&D internally by bringing more tweaks and materials to its own metal and composite platforms – most recently the addition of 316L stainless steel and dental-focused chrome cobalt material on its popular binder jet Shop System and also 316L SS, 4140 low-alloy steel, 420 SS and nickel alloy IN625 on the Production System platform – the company has sought inorganic opportunities to grow with the acquisition of multi-material 3D printing firm Aerosint and the Phonograft platform enabled through Beacon Bio, the latter of which came from its Desktop Health business line that's dedicated

06 / www.tctmagazine.com / VOL 7 ISSUE 5

SHOWN: FORUST AUTOMOTIVE LUXURY WOODEN INTERIOR

cover story

2.0

Desktop Metal on additive’s next level.

SHOWN: DENTURES MADE WITH FLEXCERA

to the dental, orthodontic and otolaryngology markets. Most recently, the company announced a definitive agreement to acquire binder jet leader ExOne and 3D printed hydraulics manufacturer Aidro, both AM pioneers in their own right. There was also the launch of its new Forust process focused on delivering sustainable 3D printing with upcycled wood waste. These expansions mean Desktop Metal now has more than 225 qualified materials across metals, composites, polymers, elastomers, ceramics, wood, sand and biocompatible materials. “That is a huge enabler,” Fulop said. “We have elastomers that are best in the world through our acquisition of Adaptive3D. We have wood, which is a ground-breaking new material made from upcycled wood waste, and we've been completely astounded by the demand for that product. We have a very good project on photopolymers and what's changed in that world in the last couple years is the ability to have epoxies or resins that basically use heat to improve the mechanical properties of the part or ring-opening chemistry. “On the metals side, what's exciting is that now with powder metallurgy, we’re able to achieve better material properties than wrought in many

cases. We've launched titanium Ti64 for our Studio System recently and we’re able to get 17% elongation and better than wrought strength - that's unheard of. That's the type of result that gives confidence to engineers to produce parts with this process for volume.” Some of the best examples of these high production volumes can be found in dental, a market which Fulop describes as the “highlight of our sector,” thanks to the 1,000+ dental customers using EnvisionTEC printers and validated materials as well as the need for customized products. Emphasizing this demand, the company announced FDA clearance for Flexcera Base and CE Mark Certification of its Flexcera resins, proprietary resins used in 3D fabrication of high-quality dental prosthetics. This was followed shortly by the launch of a turnkey metal solution based on its Shop System alongside a new chrome cobalt material option that will enable printing of custom dental products and surgical guides such as 32 partials in less than four hours. “I think where we go next is to compete with conventional manufacturing,” Fulop said, noting the production volumes now possible. “We're trying to enable the adoption of additive at scale for production of end-use parts. I'm proud of the fact that some of our customers are small businesses, and they get a return

on investment and can actually make money with this equipment. That's really what will enable broad adoption of this technology.” Companies like FreeFORM Technologies, one of the first service bureaus to offer metal binder jet AM, are already seeing that return on investment with Desktop Metal’s binder jetting solutions. Because it eliminates the need for tooling, the Production System P-1 has helped FreeFORM realize cost savings - and perhaps even more significantly, reduce lead times. In one example, FreeFORM was able to produce a medical “wrist” part in quantities of 1,000 or more at a per-part cost of $6.50 and deliver finished parts to customers in just over two weeks. Producing that same part via MIM would require an upfront investment in tooling of more than $40,000 and as much as three months before a single part was produced. As Desktop Metal looks to 2022 and the future beyond that, the company will continue to prioritize developing solutions that integrate hardware, software, and materials to make it cost-effective to deploy AM at large scales. And for some of those applications, Desktop Metal may go so far as to actually be a supplier of parts themselves - where it makes sense and where it's margin accretive to the business. With the breadth of new technologies now under one roof, when asked how the company will remain focused, Fulop confidently states: “You could ask the same question of a company like Amazon, which has grown very fast and they're able to succeed. We keep the team small, give people high accountability and push the decision making to the edges. We bring in great people and give them all the tools they need to succeed, and then we also have good managers. That is how we are able to scale.” If last year was “bases loaded”, this year they’re hitting a grand slam.

VOL 7 ISSUE 5 / www.tctmagazine.com / 07

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automotive & rail

THE FUNDAMENTALS WORDS: LAURA GRIFFITHS

he feats of additive manufacturing (AM) in the automotive industry are welldocumented. From Formula 1 parts to tooling for mass production lines, metals to polymers, track to off-track, there isn’t a pocket of the industry that isn’t using 3D technologies in some way. So when AM pioneer 3D Systems set out its roadmap following the induction of CEO Jeff Graves last year, it came as no surprise that the company selected transportation and motorsports as the focus of one of its newly established industrial teams.

side, [..] given the prevalence of EV and hybrid and all the advanced propulsion systems that are coming into the market.” In metals, Baughey points to thermodynamic and fluid management applications where the design freedoms afforded by AM are allowing components like heat exchangers and hydraulic accumulators to be packaged more eﬃciently. There are also metal structural applications where lightweighting and conserving mass are typically the goal. But, as Baughey explains, the reasons behind that are much more complex.

“Transportation and motorsports has been a big piece of 3D Systems from its inception,” Kevin Baughey, Segment Leader, Transportation and Motorsports at 3D Systems, told TCT. “We talked to our Applications Engineers and I was really taken aback by the expertise that they had in sitting in with the companies and teams within the segment.”

“When you look at the science behind it, there's static forces, dynamic forces that are being managed,” Baughey elaborated. “In many cases, the lightweighting is what you're achieving but understanding why you're achieving it is important. Sometimes it's more mass management than just pure lightweighting. Sometimes it's ‘can we lower the centre of gravity or shift the centre of gravity in certain areas and take From those initial conversations, breaking advantage?’ Another thing is the inertia of down current industry applications and it. A lot of additive is being applied to mass challenges, two key areas emerged. One motion components that are dynamically was productivity and eﬃciency within rotating or shifting back and forth and existing use cases. The other was around taking out that inertia takes out all of the “advancing the science.” eﬃciency losses, as well as the durability. [...] The key thing is looking beyond just the “The folks that we were looking at in typical term of lightweighting and looking those areas were really looking at the at the fundamental sciences that are being fundamental science and engineering applied to solve problems.” to solve problems,” Baughey explained. “That's pretty typical in Formula One Thanks to innovations in drivetrain, because they're on that advanced edge autonomy and electric vehicles, the but we're also seeing [it] in the consumer automotive industry is evolving. Because of that, Baughey says the fundamental architecture of a

vehicle is now also being challenged. Rather than doing things the way they’ve always been done (“We weren't fundamentally just rolling out a blank sheet of paper very often,” Baughey recalls of his past experience working in systems engineering and vehicle programme management.), now it’s about “getting down to the math” to understand the problems the industry is trying to solve, and that’s applicable to not only advanced motorsport applications but is also trickling down into the consumer space. “To be quite frank, if the industry hadn't been disrupted through autonomous and EV and so on, this would probably not be advancing as fast as it is now and entering into the consumer side,” Baughey added. Recent material developments are also driving more advanced applications. In metals, a newly certified Scalmalloy high-strength aluminum alloy has been engineered for weight-eﬃcient, load-bearing structural components including suspension brackets and energy and fluid management components, while Certified M789 is opening up possibilities for automotive parts with higher fidelity and thinner walls, like die inserts with conformal cooling, tire tread molds, drive train parts and axle components. It’s not just metals either, the recently added Accura AMX Rigid Black SLA resin has been adopted by TOYOTA Gazoo Racing to create long-lasting polymer production parts, while Baughey also notes some less obvious opportunities leveraging 3D Systems clear resins to manufacture interior automotive parts such as complex structures to pipe lighting through the vehicle. Baughey added: “Some of the advancements in materials have really taken them from what were traditionally prototypeuse materials, really into what an automotive lifecycle is going to look like.”

SHOWN: METAL STRUCTURAL COMPONENTS 3D PRINTED IN CERTIFIED SCALMALLOY ON A 3D SYSTEMS DMP FLEX 350

VOL 7 ISSUE 5 / www.tctmagazine.com / 09

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automotive & rail

WORDS: SAM DAVIES

Senior Engineer Malini Dusey talks to TCT about GM's application of AM.

s Scott Crump’s career came to its end last year, the inventor of Fused Deposition Modelling began to reflect on many of the highlights in his 31-year stint in the additive manufacturing sector afforded him. There were the gruelling night-time shifts in the 80s, the pursuit of investment in the 90s, partnerships with some of the biggest manufacturers in the 00s and, of course, the mainstream media attention of the 2010s. In the year before he retired, though, there was one manufacturing site visit that would stand out, that would represent the progress 3D printing technology had made and that would confirm to Crump that his efforts over the preceding three decades had been worthwhile. At a General Motors (GM) facility, he joined a group of 25 engineers in walking up and down various segments of a production line and placing post-it notes whenever they found a suitable 3D printing application. Crump expected they’d find around 20 between them. They identified 200. General Motors’ use of 3D printing can be traced back to the early

of a leader in 3D printed automotive tools. Dusey and her colleagues at the Warren Tech Center are responsible for the additive manufacture of such components, which are then distributed to GM Assembly Plants in as little as 24 hours.

“A quick success makes a great advocate.” days. The company has long utilized processes like FDM for prototyping, but as with many other automakers, has seen the application of the technology grow in recent years. The company’s big wins have come predominantly in tooling applications, with GM Additive Manufacturing Senior Engineer Malini Dusey suggesting that GM has established itself as somewhat

“When GM is poised to put new vehicles on the road,” she says, “we are looking at deploying tooling very eﬃciently and very rapidly, looking at what are the needs, how can we improve processes, where are the biggest challenges, where are the areas that we can actually make a difference? Lead time reduction is of utmost importance, and we are seeing that, with the use of additive manufacturing, we are able to build these tools very quickly, adapt to the process, they conform to the shape exactly what the job is on hand, and also lightweight them.” More often than not, GM exploits its healthy repertoire of FDM systems, which was bolstered in late 2019 with 17 additional Stratasys systems, including several F900 platforms. This equipment is used to additively manufacture handheld tools, as well as larger parts that may

 ABOVE:

3D PRINTED HAND APPLY TOOL MADE IN THE GM AIC (PHOTO BY STEVE FECHT FOR GENERAL MOTORS)

VOL 7 ISSUE 5 / www.tctmagazine.com / 011

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automotive & rail

SHOWN: GM ADDITIVE INDUSTRIALIZATION CENTER. (PHOTO BY STEVE FECHT FOR GENERAL MOTORS)

SHOWN: FDM 3D PRINTER AT THE GM AIC. (PHOTO BY STEVE FECHT FOR GENERAL MOTORS)

need assembling after the print, with powder bed fusion technology also being available. FDM has been invested in for its ability to produce load-bearing applications with carbon fiber-reinforced nylon and other ‘highly engineered plastics’, while its SLS systems are more likely to be deployed for thin-walled parts. As General Motors opened its Additive Industrialization Center at the Warren Tech Center last year, the company outlined its commitment to ‘productionizing 3D printing’ and revealed the Cadillac CT4-V and CT5-V Blackwing models to be the first GM production vehicles equipped with 3D printed parts. For these production parts, General Motors will take the same approach as it has with its tooling components. It’s an approach that has so far worked – in last year’s launch of full-size SUVs at the Arlington Assembly plant in Texas, GM supplied around 100 hand-apply tools which have been additively manufactured in nylon carbon fiber composite instead of aluminum, bringing the weight down in some parts from between 10-40lbs to 3lbs.

their needs is what they’re focused on. That allows us to identify the critical needs where additive would be a good solution.” General Motors leans on the insights of a range of personnel to identify internal applications of additive. Shop floor staff, engineers, management and suppliers have all been engaged as General Motors looks to get the most out of the technology. And as Crump fondly remembers, it’s not uncommon for the company to also tap into the design expertise of 3D printing tech suppliers in a bid to find solutions. “It’s company-wide,” Dusey finishes. “It comes all the way from the folks on the shop floor who are actually using it – they have the most immediate need

– however they will only know what’s possible if they are made aware of the capabilities of additive and even more so if they have experienced some quick successes. A quick success makes a great advocate and allows them to come up with new ideas in the future. This is relevant from the manufacturing floor all the way to management. Each team has different needs and is made up of different folks that are looking to expedite their work in a different way. The needs are varied. However, once they are made aware of what the capabilities are, it very quickly is translated to the application.”

SHOWN: MALINI DUSEY HOLDS TOOLS MADE AT THE GM ADDITIVE INDUSTRIALIZATION CENTER USING A 3D PRINTER AT THE GM TECH CENTER IN WARREN, MICHIGAN. (PHOTO BY STEVE FECHT FOR GENERAL MOTORS)

“Just because you can use additive for something, doesn’t mean that you should,” Dusey says. “As we look around again, it’s fuelled by the needs and challenges of our manufacturing plants and our folks on the floor and also our supply base, because the supply case is stretched just as thin in terms of everything moving so fast. Looking at their challenges and seeing what it is that we can do to help build tools to support

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THE INSIDE TR S

tefanie Brickwede, Head of Additive Manufacturing at Deutsche Bahn and Managing Director of Mobility goes Additive (MGA) talks to Laura Griffiths about 3D printing in the rail industry, why sustainability needs to be taken seriously and how the pandemic pressured companies to innovate.

4 RIGHT:

HANDRAIL SIGN WITH BRAILLE (SOURCE: DEUTSCHE BAHN AG / OLIVER LANG)

6 BELOW:

STEFANIE BRICKWEDE

TCT: Last time we caught up you were on a MakerBot roundtable talking about the use of 3D printing during the pandemic. Deutsche Bahn had already been using AM for a long time, but can you give us your take on how AM adoption was ramped up during that time? SB: It's not just the pandemic. We have to cope with such interruptions of supply chains nearly every month. And what really helped during the pandemic, those companies are more minded to consider alternative ways of production. Many companies say they are much more open to additive manufacturing than before. That’s one of the reasons. Others are that they were under economic pressure, they have to move. The need to think about innovation is much bigger than two years ago. TCT: During that panel, the question was asked of whether this open mindset was really going to stick with us postpandemic. And as you've just said, it's not just about a pandemic. What are your thoughts now? SB: So many companies have discovered that they can use the technology for parts, spare parts, whatever you can think of. You can see a lot of it in tooling. For tooling, you don't need any certification so those are the low hanging fruits. In the railway sector, also far beyond in the automotive sector, they’ve used AM for a very long time for prototyping and now more and more for tooling. They have printers on their premises, in their maintenance workshops or production halls, and the logic just to have an idea, produce it overnight and use it the next day is really great. This is something we

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are now experiencing also within Deutsche Bahn and other railway companies. Within the network, we have eight European railway companies. The others are thinking and considering exactly the same. What you can also experience is that you have a lot of younger and even older people who have a printer at home and bring the idea to the job. If you ask people ‘who is interested in joining in a 3D printing project or department?’, you will always find people who are really waiting for someone to ask them. TCT: You mentioned it's not just Deutsche Bahn, there are lots of other rail companies using AM. As more companies turned to AM throughout the pandemic, did you already feel ahead of the curve? SB: In the railway sector, Deutsche Bahn and French SNCF, they are leading by far. But the others are very open to that. We have a working group, which is called RAILiability, they're working on rail and liability and the exchange in that working group is so open.

SHOWN: SECONDARY RAIL STOP (SOURCE: DEUTSCHE BAHN)

automotive & rail

RACK

What you can also see is that, we all know that the automotive sector is really dealing with big change management projects, they have to focus on e-mobility so they really have to change the mind of the people. The suppliers also suffer from that crisis in automotive and it's really astonishing that not only one, but quite a few already considered producing AM parts for the medical sector. Three years ago, no one would have ever had the idea as an automotive supplier to produce parts for medical, that would have been too far. Now you can really experience that because they have to change, they have to be open minded, they have to focus on other markets. Medical definitely is a great market for AM and for us, it's great because within the [MGA] network, we already cover both mobility and medical. When we started with medical three years ago, I was asked by my board, ‘why do we do medical? We come from the railway.’ I said, okay, let's give it a try and if it doesn't work within the next two years, then we’ll stop it again. After

the pandemic, no one would ever ask such a question again. TCT: For rail applications, are we talking mainly about polymers or metals? SB: Metals as well. What you can see is that two thirds in the railway sector is polymers and about one third is metals. So, if it comes to tooling cases or smaller parts within the interior of trains, we are often talking about polymer parts. There we have to meet high levels concerning flame retardancy, which are even higher than aerospace. If you want to print parts to prevent the standstill of trains, we are often talking about metals. The metals are, of course, much more expensive and certification is more crucial. What I find really interesting is that we are now working on the first use cases of concrete for the stations, for instance. I am absolutely sure that there's huge potential but you can compare it to printing spare parts five years ago, the printing of concrete is quite new. They have to work on the certification but also on materials and [finding] the right use cases. We are also now working on elastomer printing and I'm not talking about prototyping elastomers. TPUs for prototyping existed for quite a long time but now we are talking about spare parts and those spare parts have to go on the trains for at least five to six years, being in contact with oil and dirt and whatever you can consider. TCT: Can you give us a sense of what Deutsche Bahn’s in-house AM capacity looks like? SB: We have a great team and we don't have that many printers because we still rely, I would say to 85%, at least, on printing service bureaus. We don't want to focus on the buying, if machines are suitable or not because we want to focus more on the solutions for use cases. And we're not a producing company. We're just a maintainer. For us, it's more important to cover a very broad variety of different materials, technologies and use cases, and to know exactly what is the matching technology for the use case and also to be very open to new technologies. [...] We want to focus on not just on dealing with one or two or three machines. We now have now more than 60 desktop printers within the company. Those are mainly for training, tooling and giving people the opportunity to materialize their ideas.

TCT: Does that involve a lot of redesign or is it better to repurpose current designs for AM? SB: In maintaining sectors in general, you would always stick to the full fit function of the previous part. So you would not re-design or do bionic design. That is something companies can do who are really constructing and then of course you get the full potential, but if you have to stick to certification processes, you would not change that much because, of course, we are still in a phase that many authorities have to learn about AM. First they have to trust the technology and this is much easier to prove if you stick to the former designs. From month to month, it's getting more open. TCT: One of the mission points for Mobility goes Additive is ecological sustainability. Can you touch on how AM contributes to that? SB: Most of the companies in the AM sector are either quite new start-ups or small, midsize companies. So usually, we have to give them a wake up call to focus more on ecological sustainability and not just greenwashing. We have to focus more on the ecological sustainability of materials, the whole production supply chain, how we can improve that, and it's not suﬃcient just to say that we don't need as much material as other technologies, we also have to talk about energy consumption, we have to talk about how that material is produced. And we have to talk about great use cases. This is why we started a study within MGA in cooperation with AMPOWER to have a logic where you can bring in, this is metal focused, some data concerning your part, material technology and so on and they will give you some indication of how sustainable that is. Of course, this is not on an individualized lifecycle assessment basis, but [...] this is what we really have to work on. Otherwise, the technology will lose its unique selling proposition. We all have to focus more on virtual warehouses. [...] We did an analysis within Deutsche Bahn and after six years, you have to throw away all the elastomeric parts you have on stock, whether you use them or not. [...] That's a brilliant case for AM.

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Head of Content Laura Griﬃths ﬁnds out how Wabtec reimagined a large locomotive component with AM.

n the cover of this magazine, we’ve featured a titanium brake caliper from Bugatti, landing gear for a private Bizjet plane, a Czinger supercar loaded with weight-saving 3D printed parts, all manufactured using SLM Solutions’ selective laser melting (SLM) technology. You might be thinking, ‘That’s great, but it’s not everyday life.’ Well, if the work the German metal AM leader is carrying out with Wabtec is anything to go by, that may not be the case for very long. Wabtec, a supplier of equipment and services to the global rail industry, recently set itself the task of redesigning a traditionally manufactured locomotive brake panel. The metal panel is a critical component made up of four different parts and a heavy one at 52lbs. Manufactured in France with a lengthy lead time of 3-6 months for a customer in the U.S., Wabtec looked to AM to develop a more eﬃcient alternative. “The challenge we had was to deliver some parts, very few parts, to one of our customers in North America,” Henri de Chassey, Additive Manufacturing leader for Wabtec Transit, told TCT. “The problem we have is that the normal lot to produce this kind of part is very high. We're speaking about 20 or 30 parts, and the quantity here was only three to four pieces. So it was very diﬃcult for us to find a supplier. That's why we considered, very quickly, [an] additive manufacturing solution.” With a full team devoted to AM, and a newly opened 11,000 square-foot facility at Pittsburgh’s Neighborhood 91 AM production campus, Wabtec currently has a number of metal machines in-house covering SLM and binder jet technologies, including an SLM 280 geared to Inconel and SLM 800 dedicated to aluminum. It was the scale and speed of the latter that enabled the company to redesign the brake panel as a single component. SHOWN: WABTEC BRAKE PANEL 3D PRINTED ON AN SLM 800 (SOURCE: WABTEC)

After what Henri describes as a “complete rework of the plate”, the panel’s weight was halved, and lead times reduced by 70%. The part was put through rigorous testing and certification processes to ensure both its safety and so that the full lifecycle of the panel, which could be at least ten years when installed on a train, would be equal, or even superior to the original part. The brake panel is just one part Wabtec has been exploring with AM. The company has also been testing out other critical components such as heat exchangers and brake controllers as it looks to develop pilot projects with customers to demonstrate where the technology makes sense. Right now, the biggest opportunity is in part obsolescence. Today, 66% of 3D printed parts for European railway end users are due to obsolescence and many of those issues stem from original

“Our SLM 800 is opening a new world for us.” suppliers who do not exist anymore. Wabtec recently shared that it already has more than 8,000 parts on running railway equipment manufactured by additive technologies and is targeting over 25,000 parts by 2025. “When we speak about obsolescence, for example, it's really important for our customer to have the part as soon as possible as it may prevent a train from being used.” Henri said. “Our customers can face fines of €10K to €15K per day when the train is stopped for missing components so, you can imagine the pressure they have. If you're able to come and say, we have a solution that can provide you the missing parts to put your train/metro/tram back in service’, of course, it will be very well appreciated.” This new method of manufacture has also brought sustainable advantages due to reduced material and transportation emissions, bolstering Wabtec’s mission, first set out in 2017, to create greener and more future-ready products. According to SLM Solutions, the ability to sync print parameters to any SLM 800 machine around the world also makes it much easier to manufacture locally. “Our SLM 800 is opening a new world for us because we can now bring to market very large parts,” Henri concluded. “This is really interesting because we are thinking about solving issues due to obsolescence for our after-market customers […] and thankfully with this machine we’ve succeeded with some very incredible parts. We also have many other ideas and it's changing the way to design the new original equipment because people on R&D are now thinking to additive manufacturing from the first part concept development.”

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t was an astute and well-timed comment from Stefanie Brickwede in an interview for our rail feature (page 14) that prompted the question which headlines this very article. Brickwede, Head of Additive Manufacturing at Deutsche Bahn, suggested we need to give AM companies a wakeup call “to focus more on ecological sustainability and not just greenwashing.” Brickwede isn’t the first to use the term “greenwashing”, the idea that a product can be marketed as sustainable without having the credentials to back it up, in reference to the AM sector. The topic has increasingly found its way into conversations amongst those in the industry who want to ensure AM’s green credentials are more than just buzzwords and backed up by real data. ANALYZING THE DATA It’s easy to think of AM as sustainable. You’re adding material where needed, theoretically using less than that of a subtractive method. With the advent of distributed manufacturing, you’re hopefully producing much closer to the point of need, reducing emissions along the way, and through digital warehousing, only producing those parts when you need them. With increased freedom of design, you can reduce weight, potentially saving costs and energy over a part’s lifecycle. But it’s not so clear cut. “It's like a double-edged sword,” Runze Huang, PhD, CEO & Co-founder at ExLattice, Inc. and author of a number of papers focusing on the energy and emissions saving potential of AM, says. “The unique advantages of AM, such as customization, distributed production, flexibility, and multi-material applications, are creating complexity and unique challenges in the end-of-life of

AM products. It needs to be considered more and addressed better now as we still have time before AM entering the mainstream of manufacturing and causing the sustainability issues 20 years later.” Speaking on a recent episode of TCT's Additive Insight podcast, AM consultant Phil Reeves echoed Huang’s thoughts and expressed the need to consider the full lifecycle of an AM part. “You have to look at full lifecycle, endto-end sustainability and I think we do have some issues,” Reeves explains, “certainly on the polymer side, our polymer chemistry which is maybe not as green as they could be; the actual additive manufacturing processes themselves are not as energy efficient as they could be – they haven’t been designed around energy efficiency. If you look at some of them, you pre-heat a significant amount of material to just below its melting temperature, you hit it with a laser – that’s an incredibly inefficient laser – you lose lots of energy in the room, you end up with a cake of material that you then cool down for 24 hours. That’s not an efficient manufacturing process.” Reeves suggests the next industry trend will need to be around “efficiency” of machines, supply chains and materials but also cautions that if we want to encourage the use of AM for production, not just prototyping, then the industry will need to keep up with environmental legislation. Reeves continues: “The worry is that we won’t and at some point, somebody will turn around in the corporate social responsibility group of a large car company and say, ‘that material you’re using in prototyping, we can’t use that anymore, we’re going to be legislated against it,’ so I do think we have to think, as an industry, seriously about sustainability.” Pierre Forêt, Head of AM at industrial gases and engineering company Linde, agrees that we need to be talking more

about eﬃciency. Linde has developed technologies that retain the quality of metal powder prior to printing and ensure optimum atmospheric conditions within the print chamber. Forêt says the biggest potential drawback to AM is energy usage – both in the type and volume of energy it consumes. “While no one solution can claim to make additive manufacturing more sustainable than traditional production methods, through a combination of technologies – particularly associated to the use of atmospheric gases – the process can be assured to have more reliable, repeatable quality outcomes,” Forêt says. “Once this is achieved, the advantages of additive manufacturing are, at the very least, given the potential to contribute to more sustainable production methods.” MANAGING MATERIALS Materials are just one part of the value chain where the sustainability question lingers. “Material reuse within the process is still problematic,” Alex Kingsbury, AM Industry Fellow & Engagement Lead at RMIT University, offers. “There’s no doubt that the printing process, whether it’s metal or polymer, leads to a degradation of the material and limits its reusability. There are also support structures, a necessary evil in many cases, that are waste products. In this respect, metal is much better than polymer, as the metal recycling supply chain is more flexible than the polymers recycling supply chain. For example, a polymer 3D printed product does not bear the universal recyclability symbol. Even if it does, the polymer recycling supply chain is still highly problematic. Metal at the very least, can be channelled through the scrap metal trade. We are also still yet to really properly reach upstream of 3D printed products and properly assess the raw material sources, for example, the metal powder that you use in your 3D printing process. Where does it come from? What is the carbon footprint of that process? Was it made using a fossil fuel energy source like coal or gas? Or was the electricity source hydropower?”

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Last year Materialise introduced a solution to tackle material reusability. Bluesint PA12 makes it possible to print with 100% reused powder, versus an estimated 50% currently capable with polymer laser sintering. Following the launch of its Bluesint PA12 printing service back in June, Materialise proposes that if half of all SLS PA 12 parts were printed using Bluesint, this would reduce CO2 emissions from 3D printing by more than 2,800 tons per year. “The AM industry can and needs to do more,” Andreas Vandyck, Sustainability Coordinator at Materialise, tells TCT. “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 invest in innovative technologies that help to advance their respective industries." The company recently conducted a lifecycle analysis with BASF for the production of one million pairs of midsoles. The results showed that for large-series production of identical products, AM had a bigger impact on the depletion of fossil fuels compared to conventional manufacturing. But if you consider smaller series production, the results start to tip in AM’s favor. Vandyck adds: “Across the board, “climate change”, clearly stands out as the largest contributing factor for the negative impact of AM technologies. If we look at the carbon footprint, the biggest contributors are the energy consumption of the printing process and emissions related to the production of materials. In comparison, the traditional photo-polymerization process demands the least amount of energy.” On the metals side, Sebastian Richter, Head of Powder Metals at thyssenkrupp Materials Trading is optimistic and while he agrees greenwashing is an issue, he believes metals are in a better position. “Manufacturers are now using metal powders to build structures, which means much lower material consumption,” Richter tells TCT. “Additive also allows manufacturers to have design freedom that can lead not only to product and process improvement but also low waste. You can’t achieve this with conventional processes.” thyssenkrupp Materials UK is the UK distributor for metal powders from raw

“The AM industry can & needs to do more.” materials specialist thyssenkrupp, including sustainably sourced stainless steel, aluminum, titanium and nickel-based alloys. As a provider of services to the AM industry too, Richter suggests we must also take a closer look at AM hardware. “As metal powders are low waste and recyclable materials, potential challenges in terms of sustainability for the additive manufacturing industry may lie with the 3D printing equipment,” Richter says. “Given this is still a fairly new industry, we will probably observe further optimizations of the 3D printers in order to make them more eﬃcient and more sustainable, for example, by improving the filter technology, which is currently complicated to recycle.” ExOne, for example, is confident that its metal binder jet technology can be considered green, stating that more than 95% of powder can be reused directly in the process via a simple reconditioning step. The company also says that part consolidation and design benefits afforded via binder jet can, on average, result in 30-50% weight savings, which, in the case of the automotive industry can deliver significant reductions in energy use.

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“We have no doubt that our technology is more sustainable than traditional manufacturing methods, such as machining, which generates tons of toxic waste as coolants are applied to cutting tools shaving away sometimes as much as 95% of the stock material to create a part,” Sarah Webster, Chief Marketing Oﬃcer at ExOne, says. “While there are new innovations in green coolants, most of those in use today during machining remain petroleum based and nothing in the binder jetting process comes close to the volume or type of waste generated during traditional subtractive machining processes.” Webster stresses that green benefits can also be found outside of end-use parts, namely in tooling (the company recently launched its X1 Tooling portfolio off the back of its acquisition of Freshmade 3D) where the ability to print tools directly can also reduce waste. For those metals that aren’t so easy to recycle, 6K Additive has developed a technology which specifically addresses the metal AM market. It’s UniMelt Plasma technology is said to turn virtually any scrap metal into 3D printable material, that includes new materials too. With up to 3 million pounds of titanium capable of being upcycled per year at its dedicated ISO9001 facility, Frank Roberts, President 6K Additive, says you can really see the momentum building. “It really means something to the industry,” Roberts says. “Every facet of who we're dealing with is really starting to ask these key

sustainability questions and so it's critical that we keep the momentum, that we develop best practices to make sure that we're upcycling all the material that we can, and if it can't be upcycled and go back into the industry, that there's a good home, that it's upcycled and going into another industry as an alloy addition, for example. But this is the time where we need to make sure we keep the momentum and keep the messaging strong and really make sure we focus on proper solutions for where these by-products are going.” GETTING SERIOUS Proof that serious attention is being paid can be seen in the hiring of new personnel dedicated to sustainability. EOS’ Head of Sustainability Björn Hannappel, for example, joined in January 2020 and sees the company’s main purpose as “leading the world into responsible manufacturing with industrial 3D printing.” “Compared to established manufacturing processes like casting or injection molding, AM is still a rather young and niche technology and cannot currently benefit from the scale effects of local production of raw materials, such as powder, for example,” Hannappel says. “This is certainly a topic, but an area that is improving and will have a positive effect on the decentralized production of AM parts. Additionally, at present there is not a lot of data available to calculate the positive impact additive manufacturing is having. At EOS, we also believe there is a need for more research in areas such as the closed materials

cycle, for example, the recyclability of AM parts.” DyeMansion has also announced its intent to hire a sustainability lead next year. The AM post-processing specialist is one of the first companies on board Europe's mission to become the first climate-neutral continent and on another recent episode of Additive Insight, Co-founder and CEO Felix Ewald shared how the company is embedding sustainability into every discussion. While Ewald admits sustainability is a complex issue, he remains optimistic about the “huge potential” the AM industry could have, particularly around rethinking global supply chains and decentralized manufacturing. “I'm afraid that sometimes in our industry, it's easy to say that 3D printing has a great potential impact in terms of sustainability,” Ewald cautions. “But then we should also take it seriously. And I think that's the big task that we have as an industry, not only talking about it but really [taking] action.” THE NEXT GENERATION While AM is by no means new, it is still a fairly young industry. Amongst those asked, there is a common belief that the industry can use this to its advantage. “As an emerging industry, we still have chances to establish the right way at the beginning,” Huang offers. “Of course, we have our own limitations in addressing the sustainability challenges and AM is not a panacea. But I feel the AM industry has potential to be set up as a good example in addressing sustainability challenges as a whole to push traditional manufacturing industries to do more. This will benefit our whole industry for more opportunities and faster growth.” New people coming into the sector are also keen to encourage the topic of sustainability, as Ewald shares:

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verybody always has a tendency to exaggerate their industry in terms of importance, but frankly, I think the invention of additive manufacturing (AM) and the factoring in of algorithmic, AI-based design is at least as big as the invention of the microchip.”

Hyperganic CEO Lin Kayser is back talking about the potential he sees in burgeoning design and manufacturing technologies. We are a few months on from when he last spoke to TCT, where he referenced the ‘huge shift’ required to turn engineers onto AI-based design and where he outlined its importance. Each day, the climate crisis becomes more pertinent and so too does Kayser’s demand for design innovation. In the microchip, he sees a product type that has transformed the computing sector over the last few decades, and as it did, companies were forced to explore algorithmic design. Through Hyperganic, Kayser hopes to do the same for the rest of manufacturing. What motivated him to pursue this venture was Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth, where Kayser's eyes were opened to the fact that reducing, reusing and recycling wasn’t going to be enough to tackle the climate crisis. Fifteen years on, Kayser has launched a software solution that he believes will significantly change the way products are made. And yet, he’s still regularly pursuing the insights from climate activists. More recently, he watched Christiana Figueres – renowned for her invovlement in the Paris Agreement – talk at the 2018 DLD Conference. It was further reinforcement that technologists will be key in addressing climate change. “When you talk to young people, a lot are saying, ‘Everything is going down the drain, my future is going to be less enjoyable than your past.’ And I don’t think that’s true,” he tells TCT. “I think we have the capabilities, and additive plays a huge role in that, to create something that is quite positive. I saw the invention of the smartphone. If

“The solution to climate change lies in industrial innovation.” you go back 10, 20, 30 years, there’s no resemblance to what it looked like before. It’s incredible how much has evolved. If we can move general manufacturing, design and engineering of objects to that paradigm, all bets are off how the next 1020 years are going to look like and that’s exactly what we need.”

AM has long touted its design capabilities to enable more sustainable products. But some have perhaps exaggerated that potential, or failed to mention how much energy is used and material wasted throughout the entire workflow. While efforts are now being made to ensure AM is as sustainable as it can be, Kayser suggests more will need to be done. “It’s not about lightweighting or making the supply chain shorter – this is a great start but it’s not going to be the significant part,” Kayser suggests. “The design innovation part is what is going to help us create objects and machines that can help us solve these crises. If you create completely new products, new breakthroughs in engineering, that’s how you get to [carbon] zero.” AI-based design – often in conjunction with additive manufacturing – is how Kayser thinks that can be achieved. Using algorithms, he believes a new level of design complexity can be reached; design cycles can be significantly sped up; and knowledge can be more easily shared across industries. Kayser’s vision for the future of design and manufacturing is one that leans heavily on innovation and on manufacturers being prepared to change the way they do things. But, as he expects to hear at the upcoming UN Climate Conference in Glasgow, it’s imperative that they do. “I think [design innovation] is probably the decisive element,” Kayser finishes. “I can only quote Christiana Figueres. She said that the fourth industrial revolution is the one thing that can solve this, nothing else. I don’t think we should forget about all the other things, lifestyle changes etc, there’s lot of things that can help us become more sustainable. But the solution lies in industrial innovation. I think it is probably the most critical component.”

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n the summer of 2017, Formlabs announced its plans to replicate the success it had in bringing desktop Stereolithography platforms to market with Selective Laser Sintering (SLS). It was a significant development that saw Formlabs join Sinterit and Sintratec in supplying an SLS system in the sub-$20k price range. Four years on, the Fuse 1 – as with other ‘oﬃce-friendly’ SLS platforms – is now well-established on the market. So, where do the opportunities lie for the technology, what are its limitations and are the machines really suitable for the oﬃce?

MACHINIST MOTIVATION Though Formlabs’ entry into smallformat SLS captured the attention in 2017, the pioneers of the ‘oﬃce-friendly SLS’ movement came in the form of Sintratec and Sinterit two years earlier. The former brought to market the Sintratec Kit (and has since launched the S1 and S2 systems), while the latter launched its Lisa platform (with the Lisa Pro and NILS 480 following). Sinterit was founded by a trio of engineers – including CTO Michał GrzymałaMoszczyński – to address some of the problems it had identified in the design and manufacturing space. The solutions to those problems have come in the form of the Lisa for prototyping and

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education and the Lisa Pro for functional prototypes and research, both of which fall under the $20k price banner, with the recently launched NILS 480 addressing industry needs. Across all three models, the company has installed 1,000 units.

“Our goal was to make Selective Laser Sintering available to a wide range of users,” Grzymała-Moszczyński tells TCT. “We were trying to answer the needs of other engineers, working on commercial projects, as well as science. We discovered that SLS is a missing puzzle for other branches, from medicine to research, automotive to electronics. It was the right direction. As you can see, other companies followed us designing their own compact SLS systems.” Though it took Formlabs sometime longer to execute its SLS R&D efforts, the company has made significant strides this year, attracting the interest of Brose, Hypertherm and Partial Hand Solutions after the launch in January. Starting from around $18,499, the Fuse 1 is said to be designed for minimal upkeep and uses patent-pending Surface Armor technology to combat the ‘orange peel’ surface texture problems often

associated with SLS. It is also supported by a materials portfolio that includes PA 12 and PA 11, as well as the PreForm print preparation software, which Jacob Wilson at Additive-X – a Formlabs reseller – suggests is a key selling point because of its familiarity with customers. Such familiarity has certainly seen Fuse 1 users put the machine to good use per the company’s Engineering Business Product Lead Kathy Bui. “The type of customers that we’ve gotten for the Fuse has been largely for end use parts,” she explains. “We have a decent amount of healthcare customers who are using this for prosthesis and orthotics and then we also have people who are making limited run production of parts. We’re seeing more and more people use SLS for actual production and not just prototyping.” ‘MORE THAN A MAYBE’ Despite the launch of the NILS 480 representing a step towards more ‘industrial’ applications, one of Sinterit’s most renowned users is Rawlplug – the company known for developing the world’s first wall plug – who has deployed the machine to meet its prototyping needs. By bringing 3D printing in-house, the company has reduced the lead time for its

SHOWN: PARTS PRINTED WITH THE FORMABS FUSE 1

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time of 100 hours printing on a Fuse 1 to match 24 hours for a P110, so pound for pound the P110 is the better option if you are doing high volumes. That’s not to say that the Fuse 1 is not a good machine, it’s more to say that if you’re a bureau, it’s not the right choice.”

SHOWN: THE FORMLABS FUSE 1 MACHINE

prototype parts from two weeks to two days after purchasing the LISA Pro machine. Streamlining design cycles was among the foremost aims when developing these machines. The driver was taking the highquality capabilities and material options of SLS and scaling them down into a smaller package that is affordable and ‘office-friendly.’ This would allow designers to sit at the desk, model parts in CAD and rapidly prototype them on a machine next to their workstation. 3DPRINTUK CEO Nick Allen, however, doesn’t believe that to be practical with SLS. “The term ‘office-friendly’ should be seen as ‘workshop friendly’,” he says. “I wouldn’t want one in an office – the same goes for other non-SLS 3D printers; none of them have been fun to sit next to. With SLS, the big one is dust and no matter how ‘dust friendly’ or ‘controlled with laminar air flow’ the machines are, the dust still gets everywhere.”

“Having in-house SLS 3D printers is a huge step into productivity.”

SHOWN: PARTS PRINTED WITH THE SINTERIT LISA

Having expanded 3DPRINTUK’s fleet of SLS systems to nine last year, Allen has been keeping a close eye on the release of smaller-format machines from the likes of Formlabs, Sinterit, Sintratec and Wematter. He’s not yet felt compelled to invest in the technology for his service bureau. But Coloradobased Precision Parts Fast has. “We did extensive research on various [smaller SLS] platforms, and we liked the Fuse 1 and user interface the most,” offers Precision Parts Fast President & COO Brian Korbelik. “First, it is properly priced for the value you receive, and it is easy to operate. Secondly, it has a fairly fast print time. Although the lasers are not especially powerful or quick, we are able to stack parts in the chamber to save our customers time and cost. Also, the build chamber is fairly large for a smaller format printer.” “They do not have the capacity/ speed that the industrial machines have,” Allen explains of his stance. “Some [cigarette] packet maths on the Fuse 1 vs an EOS P110 got me a build

Precision Parts Fast invested in the Fuse 1 because of its ability to produce complex geometries and intricate features, as well as its suitability for small-to-mid batch and high mix production runs for customers in the electronics, consumer goods, and manufacturing sectors. This, the vendors will feel, is where their machines can be of use to service providers. “I think that it is beneficial for service bureau to look into some of the smaller options because of capex upfront, first of all, and then second, for a lot of service bureau, you want to think about incremental scalability and capacity,” Bui says. “If you buy an industrial printer, but it’s uptime is only 5%, a lot of capacity is going to waste. If you buy a printer like the Fuse 1, you can scale incrementally as your demand increases over time.” The same applies for design and manufacturing brands, where the vendors of small-format SLS believe there is now greater potential to bring 3D printing in-house, whether it be for prototyping or more. Being able to process nylon materials, per Bui, is among the main reasons why users have been able to ‘jump directly to end-use parts’ with the Fuse 1, while she has also seen Brose demonstrate the ability to produce jigs and fixtures ‘just in time’ by bringing small-format SLS under its roof. Allen, meanwhile, suggests that companies spending more than £25k a year on SLS parts - £50k if they require finishing – should be exploring the potential of insourcing the technology, while Wilson notes the cost and time-saving benefits of using the same machine to prototype and produce parts can be significant. Sinterit suggest that users can achieve a return on investment within 40 days with their newest machine and claim that ‘most of the world’s car producers’ have a Lisa or Lisa Pro system in their labs already. As such, they can’t comprehend a future whereby manufacturers aren’t utilizing small-format SLS. “Having in-house SLS 3D printers is a huge step into productivity,” says GrzymałaMoszczyński. “It saves money, time and is crucial if you don’t want to share your project with third-party companies. It is more than a considerable option. I cannot imagine that, in a few years, a serious design or manufacturing company would not have a well-implemented SLS technology in-house and retain any competitiveness on the market.”

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REINVENTING O

wed to its origins in serving the US military, its claims of ‘inventing casual’ back in the 1950s and its ability to attract the custom of David Bowie, Tom Hanks and Sharon Stone, durability, comfort and style have always been the focus for Hush Puppies.

And despite the global footwear brand’s VP/ GM Kate Pinkham recently hinting at a fresh approach to ‘reinvent casual’ over the coming decades, those requirements remain top of mind for the company.

“Sustainability goes hand in hand with customization and personalization.”

Pinkham made the remark about reinventing casual when commenting on the company’s excitement to collaborate with Voxel8, the Massachusetts-based 3D printing firm recently acquired by Kornit Digital, whose high-speed industrial inkjet technology is used to develop products in the apparel and textiles industries. By the time Voxel8 was acquired by Kornit Digital, its work with Hush Puppies was already well underway. As with other partnerships between footwear brands and 3D printing providers, the Hush Puppies collaboration is exploiting Voxel8’s ability to print lattice structures. “3D printing is rapidly evolving as a viable footwear technology,” Louk Schulten, Product Development Director at Hush Puppies, told TCT. “Voxel8 developed, patented and owns the printer-heads that make it possible to print our 3D lattice. It is unique to them and now to Hush Puppies to be able to create and produce these lattices. No other company in the world can produce these.” FINE TUNING In particular, the focus is on midsole inserts, with the lattices being ‘precisely tuned’ to ensure enhanced shock absorption. Using Voxel8-printed latticed midsole inserts, there is no deviation in shock absorption and four times less thickness change after 100,000 cycles when compared to traditional foams. This means that Hush Puppies shoes fitted with these 3D printed midsole inserts can match the comfort of existing footwear products with a significant increase in longevity. “For a consumer, when they buy a pair of Hush Puppies, they would like to make sure that the comfort they feel on day one is the comfort they feel a year later,” Friedrich von Gottberg,

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Vice President Additive Manufacturing Textiles at Kornit Digital (formerly Voxel8 CEO), said. “And the problem with traditional foams is they essentially collapse and bottom out over a period of time. So, they may feel comfortable in the store, but give yourself a few months, they don’t feel so comfortable.” “The Voxel8 lattice provides a cushioning platform with an infinite number of options to customize underfoot cushioning and rebound/ energy return that Air, Gel and Boost [other footwear cushioning types] cannot provide,” explained Pete Dillon, Senior Product Developer at Hush Puppies. Voxel8’s approach to addressing these issues has been to take advantage of the latticing capabilities and materials portfolio of its ActiveLab 3D printing offering. The company’s technology leans on the ActiveMix printhead which enables ‘on the fly formulation of high-performance elastomers’, whereby the material properties of the printed structures can be changed by ‘multiple orders of magnitude.’ ActiveMix supports both extrusion and spray deposition and is capable of controlling the precision dosing of elastomeric raw materials to generate the aforementioned material property changes across a single print with one material set.

SHOWN: FOOTWEAR PRODUCT DEVELOPED WITH VOXEL8 TECHNOLOGY

SHOWN: THE VOXEL8 ACTIVEMIX PRINTHEAD IN ACTION

CONSUMER PRODUCTS

G CASUAL WORDS: SAM DAVIES

The company works with high- performance materials, such as polyurethane elastomers, and uses its ActiveMix printhead to adjust the properties of the polymer in accordance with the demands of the application. In terms of hardness, for example, Voxel8 prototyped a series of latticed midsole inserts for Hush Puppies ranging from a softer 50 Shore A hardness to a stiffer 85 Shore A hardness, before assessing each iteration in compression and rebound tests. This ability to alter the material properties via the ActiveMix printhead is compounded by Voxel8’s ability to also tweak the lattice structure to impact on performance characteristics like comfort and longevity. “You start off with having the best materials,” von Gottberg explained, “but then, more importantly, you SHOWN: VOXEL8'S LATTICING CAPABILITIES

can change the chemical composition of the lattice structure as you’re printing it, so the bottom of the lattice can be different from the top, the left, the right, the middle, etc. Hence, you’ve got another handle to vary properties and, as a result, you can tune or customize what you’re looking for from the lattice you create. This ability to tune and change chemical composition while you’re printing is really unique.”

SUSTAINABLE SUPPLY While demonstrating these capabilities through its work with Hush Puppies, Voxel8 has been developing prototypes locally within days and hours, allowing the footwear brand to review the designs, test them, generate feedback and start the next cycle of iterations much more eﬃciently than it typically would. In the past, Hush Puppies, like many other fashion brands, has prototyped and manufactured products exclusively in Asia, leading to design and production cycles of up to 18 months. With Voxel8 proving out the logic of prototyping locally, the idea for Hush Puppies to onshore at some point in the future is certainly on the agenda. For the latticed midsole inserts, production will ramp up at Voxel8’s Somerville, MA facility before expanding to Asia for volume manufacturing. But Voxel8 believes there is huge potential for brands like Hush Puppies to begin manufacturing products locally again. Through the work Voxel8 and Kornit Digital do in the apparel industries, they are aware that while most brands will continue to manufacture out in Asia, there is an interest in onshoring. Though it will take time to transfer supply chains from one continent to another, Voxel8 and Kornit Digital believe it will help to significantly reduce the 18-month design and production cycles, open the door for customized products and result in a more sustainable way of manufacturing. “Sustainability goes hand in hand with customization and personalization,” von Gottberg said. “A lot of times, when you make apparel, about 30% of it is thrown away, because it never actually meets the demand of the consumer: fashion trends change, etc. But, if you’re making something for a particular individual, guess what? You’re making it for a person who is going

to use it and hence you’re reducing a lot of waste, so they’re all intertwined. And if you do it locally, you can deliver within days or hours, which is the holy grail. That’s actually [another] important element, because as they onshore, customization and personalization become real. It’s no use personalizing something and having to wait six weeks. If you want to personalize it, you need to do it quickly. The brands are going to drive it and it will take time, but eventually they’re going to get to this personalization element.” This was a driving factor when Kornit Digital began to consider acquiring Voxel8. Over the last few years, the company has identified a series of societal trends – accelerated by the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic – that point towards a need for the on-demand manufacture of customized or personalized goods in a more sustainable way. Kornit Digital CTO Kobi Mann explained that the company needed a complimentary technology to its existing inkjet solutions in order to facilitate that and become the ‘on-demand operation system for sustainable manufacturing.’ In Hush Puppies, it has a partner that is already seeing the fruits of this ambition. By aligning with Voxel8, it is enjoying the ability to print parts with a ‘high degree of accuracy’ that ‘create less waste and give each piece a specific function and purpose.’ The company is also now relying less on tier 2 suppliers, further exploring customized footwear products, and believes it can compete with the biggest footwear brands around. “Voxel8 gives Hush Puppies the ability to address needs and customize footwear on and under the foot without molds, cutting dies and MOQs [minimum order quantities],” noted Dillon, “allowing for things like different under foot cushioning for men’s and women’s or per size; multi density cushioning with no adhesives; and upper designs that reduce the number of materials used, saving the ecosystem while providing unlimited options in color and physical properties.” “[3D printing] gives Hush Puppies a competitive edge and the ability to propel the brand forward to the forefront of practical and applicable shoe component development,” Schulten added. “In a matter of fact, it puts Hush Puppies at par or ahead of brands like Adidas, Nike and New Balance who all have shown interest in the same 3D printed shoe components.”

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Expert Column

REMEMBER THE MAGIC … AND YOUR MEASUREMENTS Words: Robin Dallen, Consultant at Arke Ltd

ne of my favourite things about working in additive manufacturing (AM) is the look on someone’s face when they see a machine in action for the first time. That look of wonder as an image appears in a layer of powder or the nose pressed up against the glass as a nozzle lays down layer after layer and an object appears. That goes double if the part is something they’ve designed themselves - there’s a reason why the first job we gave interns in my previous role was to design a name badge and print it themselves on a very knackered old UPrint. You never forget what it feels like to hold a part in your hand and know that before this moment, that part existed only on a screen and you put it there. It was this feeling that largely ignited my passion for AM and the secret to my continued enthusiasm for this industry is that I have never lost touch with the joy (dare I say, magic) that I experienced when I held my first part. In 2008, I was a mechanical engineering undergraduate on placement in Munich, Germany. I was working on a project to redesign an orthotic brace for a partially paraplegic cyclist. It was to be manufactured using laser sintering. I had no concept of manufacturing something straight from a CAD design so when my boss came into the oﬃce one day with some trial parts that I had designed not two days before, I was astonished. Firstly, at the speed, secondly at the flawlessness of the parts, and thirdly at the size. My parts were about the size of a 2€ coin. They’d looked so big on the screen! I checked my measurements - sure enough, I’d made the test pieces about 30mm square and completely failed to notice that this would be really small. The first lesson I learned about AM, and I’ve had cause to pass onto others since, is always check your measurements.

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“Joy turns the ordinary into an adventure.”

The following month, we went to visit the manufacturer of our orthotic. This was the first time I’d ever seen a laser sintering machine and I was in awe. It was far and away the most amazing thing ever. I got to remove our parts from the powder cake and I simply could not get over the fact that the parts were just there exactly as we designed them. My childlike wonder was a source of amusement to my colleagues. “The novelty wears off after a while,” one of them said, “it just becomes part of the job.” At the close of the project, the cyclist took our AM orthotic to the Paralympic Games in Beijing and won a silver and a gold medal. I never tire of talking about the small part that I got to play in that success. Over a decade later, I can safely say, I am still waiting for the novelty to wear off. My career has taken a turn for the more mundane, some might say, but AM has never lost its sparkle. I’m that person who calls AM tooling “sexy.” I still stand in front of any kind of AM machine and call it witchcraft, even though I know exactly how and why it works. I’m excited to think that there’s still more that AM can do. The reason I say this is that enthusiasm makes things happen. Joy turns the ordinary into an adventure. Amazing things occur when someone gets excited and says, “what if we tried this?” So the next time you’re looking at an AM machine or holding a part, remember how you felt the very first time. Remember why you found AM exciting in the first place and ask yourself if you’re missing something extraordinary by thinking of AM as mundane. Recapture your joy and see where it could take you. And always remember to check your measurements.

DESIGN

BUILD

MACHINE

INSPECT

The total AM process chain Can your partner for additive manufacturing (AM) provide end-to-end expertise and support? Only one company in the 3D printing industry offers the technologies and expertise that provide both highly productive metal 3D printing AND control of all finishing and downstream processes. For end-to-end process control of AM parts, speak to Renishaw now.

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TCT North America 7.5

Articles inside

REMEMBER THE MAGIC AND YOUR MEASUREMENTS

REINVENTING CASUAL

SMALL-FORMAT, BIG POTENTIAL

MINDFUL MANUFACTURING

HOW GREEN IS AM?

SOLUTIONS BY DESIGN

TOOLING UP

BIG BRAKE

THE FUNDAMENTALS

THIS IS AM 2.0

THE INSIDE TRACK