Two finalists were announced on Friday for the inaugural LEAP Awards’ Additive Manufacturing Category, comprising a fascinating array of new additive technology advances.
The competition was scored by a panel of independent technical/engineering-oriented judges. Responsible for the Additive Manufacturing category were these four judges:
Carl Dekker, President, MET-L-FLO Inc.
Met-L-Flo Inc. is a Contract Manufacturer specializing in 3D Printing and Additive Manufacturing using multiple different technologies for its clients. Dekker has presented his work at various conferences globally and has been published in various industry journals. He is currently the Chair of the ASTM F42 Committee on Standards for Additive Manufacturing, VP of the Additive Manufacturing Users Group (AMUG), and a Past Chairperson of the SME’s Rapid Technologies and Additive Manufacturing (RTAM) Community (formerly the RPA). He is also a proud recipient of the AMUG SLA “Dinosaur” award.
Dekker has held positions as: Rapid Prototyping and Manufacturing Conference Advisor (2002-2018), Industry Advisory Board Member for RapidTech (2010-2014), RapidTech National Visiting Committee Chair (2011-2014), T.E.A.M. NAB (Technician Education in Additive Manufacturing National Advisory Board) Member 2011-2014, 2017, Museum of Science and Industry Fab-Lab Advisory Board Chicago (2009-2012), Waubonsee Community College Industry Advisory Board (2008-10), Valley Industrial Association Board Member (2009-12), National Design and Manufacturing Conference Advisor 2005, National Plastics Exposition Conference Advisor 2006 and 2009 and Secretary of the 3D Systems North American Stereolithography Users Group 2003 and 2004. He has also served as the Chair of many specialty programs and conference sessions.
Bradford L. Goldense, President, Goldense Group Inc.
Bradford L. Goldense is a subject matter expert in the management and processes of product development, innovation and performance measurement. He has authored or been cited in more than 300 articles and books and holds nearly 150 registered copyrights.
Goldense was a faculty member of the Graduate Engineering School Executive Program at The Gordon Institute of Tufts University for 19 years. He is internationally recognized and has consulted with more than 200 of the Fortune 1000 in 500 manufacturing locations around the world. GGI has helped many companies to increase their stock price by improving R&D innovation and execution, and by improving communications of prowess to the marketplace and investor community.
He previously held positions at Texas Instruments, Price Waterhouse, Knight & Associates, Index Group, and a family engineering business before founding GGI. Goldense has a BSCE from Brown University and an MBA from Cornell’s Johnson School. He holds four professional certifications: New Product Development Professional by the Product Development and Management Association, Certified Manufacturing Engineer by the Society of Manufacturing Engineers, Certified Computer Professional by the Institute for Certification of Computer Professionals and Certified in Production and Inventory Management by the American Production and Inventory Control Society.
Goldense was a founding member of the Society of Concurrent Engineering and founder of the Society of Concurrent Product Development which he ran until 2006. He retired from the board in 2012. His non-profit corporation lives on, with appreciated support and funding from 3M.
Russ Hempstead, Senior Development Engineer, Just Right Surgical
Russ Hempstead has been working in the medical device industry for more than 25 years. He has focused on early stage design and development through manufacturing of class II medical devices. Biomedical engineering was an obscure specialty when he attended college, so he pursued his degree in mechanical engineering with an emphasis in polymer science.
Hempstead has extensive experience in clinical settings for the purposes of early concept generation, as well as product launch. Clinical settings include animal and cadaver labs for product validation activities and hospital operating rooms for procedure familiarization and observation. He has led engineering teams in various facets of device development and manufacturing for the last 13 years. In all of those instances, he was an individual contributor in addition to the project manager. Hempstead has been considered a subject matter expert in the areas of plastic material selection for biocompatibility and sterilization, design for injection molding, design for manufacturability, and finite element analysis.
Mike Vasquez, CEO, 3Degrees, LLC
Dr. Mike Vasquez is a 3D Printing expert, specializing in pushing the boundaries of advanced 3D printing technology. He is the Founder of 3Degrees, a Chicago-based consulting company focused on helping organizations maximize their investment in the technology.
Over the past decade, Vasquez has worked side-by-side with some of the top machine manufacturers, material producers and end users in the industry, consulting with them to identify novel applications, test new materials, and develop frameworks to maximize R&D efficiency and boost ROI. He has also created a software tool called Trace. It aims to assist companies formalizing their use of 3D Printing to ensure they can meet quality and technical standards outlined by their supply chain and industry requirements.
Vasquez completed his PhD in Additive Manufacturing at Loughborough University and received both his Bachelor’s and Master’s from MIT in Materials Science and Engineering.
Here are descriptions of the two finalists. The overall winner of the Additive Manufacturing category will be announced at an awards dinner on December 11th in Costa Mesa, Calif.
3D Systems
Figure 4
Figure 4 is a scalable, fully integrated plastic 3D printing platform providing productive and cost-effective digital molding for any factory. Through its speed and automation, it delivers greater productivity at a lower total cost of operation, producing repeatable, accurate parts with demonstrated Six Sigma performance. It provides the world’s fastest additive manufacturing throughput and time-to-part (up to 15x faster than alternative additive methods). This is the first commercial additive manufacturing technology to deliver unprecedented throughput with six sigma repeatability.
Figure 4 makes automated 3D printing in volume possible. The configurable units allow manufacturing capacity to grow with demand – from a standalone printer for rapid prototyping and low-volume production, to modular units designed to scale with growth, to a fully automated factory solution.
The digital molding workflow process speeds and simplifies production with automation of low-volume plastic parts production. Figure 4 delivers repeatable, true-to-CAD part accuracy in an agile, in-line manufacturing workflow.
Figure 4 Production with 3D Sprint software delivers ultra-fast additive manufacturing technology in discrete modules, allowing it to be placed into automated assembly lines and integrated with secondary processes, including the washing, drying and curing of end-use parts. Features like automated material delivery and integrated post-processing reduce hands-on processes to streamline operations and lower total ownership costs.
Since its invention nearly 150 years ago, injection molding has been a linchpin of the manufacturing world. Although it has been simplified and sped up by advances in CNC and 3D printing, the production of tooling of increasingly complex injection molds is still measured in weeks and sometimes months.
But with Figure 4’s ability to digitally develop a mold, designs for digital molding can address functionality only, not draft angles, undercuts, side inserts and other features required for injection molding. As compared to the several weeks it takes for the initial design of a textured injection molded part, digital molding can be done in a matter of hours. Once the design is complete, products begin shipping almost immediately after final design.
Digital molding with Figure 4 also enables the eradication of Minimum Order Quantities. Part volumes from 1 to 1000 can be quickly produced without the costs of tooling and tooling changes that increase costs. This makes it easier for OEMs to hold lower, and more realistic, inventories for the maintenance supply chain in parts services groups.
HP
Jet Fusion 300/500 series full-color 3D printers
HP’s Jet Fusion 300/500 Series is a 3D printing technology that enables manufacturers to quickly produce engineering-grade, functional parts in full color, black, or white – with voxel-level control of color and part properties.
For the design and manufacturing of the Jet Fusion 300/500 series 3D printers, HP used its own 3D printing technology: Multi Jet Fusion.
The printers are driven by a breakthrough in full-color 3D printing technology: HP’s patented Bright Fusing Agent.
To enable voxel-level, full-color 3D printing with a microscopic degree of design and production control of color, material, and part properties, HP’s 3D R&D teams created black fusing agents able to absorb heat at greater speeds. But printing color with exclusively black agents isn’t possible, so a new solution needed to be found.
HP’s scientists realized that they needed a primer coat of white on the outer layers of the black parts so that color could be applied and fused. But how could you create a layer of white when all available fusing agents were black? A new kind of fusing agent was needed, so that the surface of the fused part remained white but absorbed heat as well as black. And they found the answer in an unexpected realm of light — one that we’re unable to see.
HP discovered an ingenious way to bypass the visible light spectrum: using the infrared light that gives us heat. To harness the power of infrared light, HP engineers experimented to find the exact spectrum of energy-absorption that a clear agent would need to successfully fuse color. Once that was accomplished, they were able to identify a new kind of clear additive that could absorb invisible infrared light, and heat and enable a complex fusion of printing materials, heating agents, and colors with microscopic precision.
