AM2019, Austin, TX Rick Neff

The theme of AM 2019 is SCALE.  AM has migrated from rapid prototyping to low volume production to full production.  That is, it is now production at scale. 

Pete Zelinski - Editor-In-Chief – Additive Manufacturing Magazine.  How Additive Manufacturing is Changing Production? 

Pete kicked off with a keynote emphasizing scale.  Up to 3000 parts are economically produced with AM compared to injection molding. 

Machining and additive go hand in hand, Some machining is often part of post-processing.  He also said that he believes that every machine shop should have a polymer printer. (I think they should have a metal printer too.)

Ellen Lee – Technical Leader Additive Manufacturing – Ford

Ford has 30 facilities with 3D printers.  They have a new 100,000 square foot facility for AM development.  They are looking at personalizing products.  They also have a significant number of small quantity vehicles ... < 10,000 where they can effectively use additive for production. 

They see challenges in the availability to print automotive grade materials, not just SS and titanium. 

Scott Schiller – Global Head Market Development – HP 3D Printing

Big data and analytics are now the backbones of a product life cycle.  Presented a graph that was in several presentations. This graph is a bell curve with time on the x-axis and production quantities on the y axis. It is a bell curve starting with prototyping, then low rate production, then the middle of the curve is full production and the right side is production winding down and spare parts support. The point is that additive is working its way into the middle of the graph where customers are making production quantities. 

HP Multijet Fusion systems are replacing low-volume injection molding in production applications. 

Eric Gatlin – GM Additive Integrated Product Team – GE Aviation, The GE9x: How AM is Changing Aircraft Engines and the Supply Chain

This is the first public presentation on the impact of additive manufacturing on the GE9X Engine for the 777X, the world’s largest engine will enter service in 2020. 

Additive manufacturing has contributed to:

10% lower specific fuel burn

30% margin on CAEP 8 NOx regulations

5% Better specific fuel consumption

8 dB margin on Stage 5 noise regulations

3rd Generation of additive manufactured parts

A breakdown of where AM is used in production:

1 T25 Sensor

8 Inducers

1 Heat Exchanger

228 LPT Turbine Blades

28 Combustor mixers

28 Fuel nozzles

They reported gains in precision, durability, weight and parts reduction

They now have 70 printers in Auburn AL

They have achieved; revenue growth, invested capital reduction and operating margin improvement as supply chain benefits from switching to additive.   

Keys to success:

              Blur the lines

              Shape freedom

              System design

              FastWorks

              Think Big

Zach Murphree – Director - Velo 3D  Predictable Part Quality Enabled by In-Situ Metrology 

Talked about some unique features of their products.  They can print without supports and can print geometries that were previously unprintable. 

They have a one-button prebuild calibration of their system

They take a quantitative scan of the powder bed after spreading and laser sintering. They test their machine with a full print volume print of very difficult parts.

Death of the .stl file as they use print preparation software directly from CAD.

Wolfgang Hansal – Managing Director – Hirtenbereger

They make an electrochemical machine that they claim can improve the surface finish of LPBF parts, remove supports and dissolve the excess powder.  The process obviously removes material but does not round corners like other polishing.  They use different chemicals for different metals.  Their systems can be built with multiple baths for improved throughput or being able to accept a variety of metals.  It looks like a complete machine.  Their H900 machine can do 150 parts per hour.  It removes 20-30 microns of material from the surface.

Mariel Diaz – CEO – Triditive - Automation for the Industrialization of AM

Presented the concept of using their AMCELL machine to make metal parts using the FFF process and automation. 

Melanie Lang – Co-Founder – Formalloy

They make a DED machine that can be equipped with a multi-nozzle head to apply many different powders.  They scan every layer with a laser profilometer that has a 30 mm view and a 200 mm/sec scan speed.  Roughly equivalent to their build speed so scanning doubles production time. 

George Allman – Manufacturing Engineering Supervisor – Liberty Electronics, Transforming Productivity and Ergonomics in the Aerospace Industry Using 3D Printed Accommodations

George provided examples of a few hours of empathetic engineering in coordination with shop floor people who can increase productivity by 300%.  They were able to make assembly aids, which he called accommodations that helped improve the safety and productivity of the workers on their shop floor assembling aerospace electric cabling. 

Bonnie Meyer – Applications Manager – Evolve Additive Solutions, An Under-the-Hood Look at STEP Technology - Polymer AM for Production

This is a new technology additive process just coming out from under wraps.  Initial investment from Stratasys, Lego, Stanley Black & Decker, and one other have resulted in a completely independent company from Stratasys where the technology started.  They have development partners in Kodak, Siemens, and Evonik.  It is a selective thermoplastic electrographic process.  It works like a laser printer or copier that uses a laser to attract part powder to a drum where it is then transferred to the top of a part.  The part is built fairly quickly in small layers.  They feel they have an advantage in material. speed, quality, scalability, and cost.  They claim they can make dense parts with isotropic properties. 

Fabian Krauss – Global Business Development Manager Polymers – EOS, How Additive Manufacturing Complements Conventional Plastic Production

fabian.krauss@eos-na.com

Fabian had an engaging presentation where he made fun of long German words like FERTIGUNGSVERFAHRENSDIREKTVERGLEICH which means 3D Printing vs. Injection Molding.

He presented the Aetrex approach to scanning and then 3D printing a custom insole with custom blue TPU. EOS did a lot of work to help with the entire process from unique lattice structures with different cushion effect to the supply chain needed for mass customized production.

New Technology Alert - Laser Profusion Technology with thousands of lasers, one for each pixel of a layer = 10x production speed available in 2021

Ken Burns – Technical Director - Forecast 3D, Carlsbad CA

Talked about their history and their implementation of 26 HP Multijet Fusion Systems in a service bureau. 

They do not pack the system as full as you might expect. They often angle parts to keep from having layers that are much hotter than others.  You can overheat a layer and cause distortion and part problems. 

Overall, they have 45 industrial 3D printers and 150 employees. 

Additive fixed costs are not zero but they are much smaller than tooling costs.  If you focus on reducing the fixed costs of a job it can be competitive with conventionally tooled parts. 

Nate Haug – Mechanical Engineer – Ingersoll Machine Tools

Talked about the development of their very large-scale thermoplastic additive machine, WHAM.  It appears to be the biggest machine on the market. They have shipped at least one.

Bernie Kerschbaum – CEO – Rosler Metal Finishing USA

They sell multiple types of processes for post processing metal AM parts.  He suggested that design for additive is not enough.  You need to design for post processing as well.  For instance you might orient parts on a build plate so they can be machined before removal from the plate. You may need to make fewer parts in a build to reap huge benefits on the post processing side.

Aaron LaLonde – Director of Applications – SLM Solutions

Discussed strategies for improving throughput from higher power lasers to multiple lasers.  One thing they do is small layers on the outside of a part and only sinter the infill every two or three layers called Hull and Core.    

Tim Bell – Additive Manufacturing Business manager – Siemens

Tim touted that digitization enables setting up a virtual factory so you can work out he process before you even break ground. 

ESSENTIUM Open House

ESSENTIUM is a specialty filament and extrusion-based machine manufacturer.  They have some filament production techniques that set them apart.  They can extrude a filament with a jacket of a different material on the outside.  This allows them to put harder material on the outside of a very flexible TPU so that it can be extruded.  This allows them to put a coating on the outside that can be heated to better weld the layers together and improve z strength.  They have an extensive material testing lab and explained some of their processes.  They are concerned about plastics that will dissipate electrostatic discharge.  Seems like one of their niche markets is in tooling for the electronics industry.  Not a surprise as the design of their ultrafast printer originated with similar machines used for electronics manufacturing. 

EOS Open House

EOS let us spend time in their showroom.  They have multiple metal machines in one room and multiple polymer machines in an adjacent room.  They explained the customer process they worked out with Aetrex.  This is an application where Aetrex has the ability to scan customers’ feet and provide a custom fit orthotic that is 3D printed on EOS machines.  They developed several innovations for Aetrex.  They developed a special material with appropriate flexible properties and it is Aetrex blue.  They developed several infills with the proper density for each type of engineered layer.  They developed special laser paths to improve the speed of producing the infill hatch. 

Their R&D manager explained the importance of the digital thread in industry 4.0.  The Design, Material, Data, and Business case all make up the digital thread.  The data includes the design, material traceability, post-processing, logistic data, machine data.  They offer a visual camera, laser melt pool monitoring, and a camera that measures temperature.  They get gigabytes of data that they call the fingerprint of the process.  They are admittedly not quite there yet on analyzing the data.

LINK3D – One of several partners that made presentations at EOS.  LINK3D is MES (Manufacturing Execution Software) with an additive factory in mind.  This ties production planning, machine scheduling, and work center management together to work with an ERP system.