Industrial 3D Printing: 10 Basics in 20 Minutes

Jim:

Hello everyone. Welcome to Manufacturing the Future. 3D printing. Additive manufacturing. Few new process technologies have been studied, talked about and debated as much as this new way of making polymer and metal parts. Now, everyone from school children in classrooms to global manufacturers are using additive technology, with industry using it mainly for prototyping and product development, but also increasingly for production part making. The majority of manufacturers, however, don’t have the resources of a multinational corporation. Many are aware of the potential of additive, but are reluctant to take the plunge. The rewards are considerable, and the barriers to entry are lower than most manufacturers think. Now, the first step in lowering those barriers is a good understanding of the fundamentals of industrial 3D printing. Joining me to talk about this is Patrick Schrade, head of application engineering at the Additive Minds Academy at EOS, and Fabian Alefeld, the Senior Manager for the Additive Minds Consulting and Academy Services at EOS North America. Patrick and Fabian, welcome to the show.

Fabian:

Hey Jim, thanks for having us.

Jim:

This technology, it’s become so popular. It’s so much in mass culture now. We see everyone, even children in schools, making interesting things. We know engineers have been prototyping with this technology for many, many years. But we’re just starting to see some real production applications emerge from this. So I’m really excited that we can sort of establish a baseline knowledge base for professionals to really get a grip on this tech. Can we start from the beginning? And let me start, perhaps with you, Patrick. What is 3D printing or additive manufacturing? Do those terms mean the same thing?

Patrick:

Actually they are the same, but they are also not the same. So, 3D printing is a borrowed term that also includes additive manufacturing. Typically additive manufacturing refers to more robust and final part production, whereas 3D printing often refers to more desktop type systems and prototyping. I would say that’s the common sense.

Jim:

That’s an interesting way to think of it, because the terms are used interchangeably. And I even find myself occasionally using those terms interchangeably because in popular media, of course, they talk more about 3D printing and less about additive. So, we should think about 3D printing as more of the prototyping, one-off desktop machine and additive as the production process?

Patrick:

This is how I would see it, correct. You named it.

Jim:

Yeah. Fabian, what different types of machines are there out there? I know there are several.

Fabian:

Yeah, Jim, there are many different types of additive manufacturing technologies, and we could spend this whole 30 minutes talking about them, but ultimately we distinguish between metal technologies and we distinguish between polymer technologies. If we look at polymer technologies, there are different baselines around additive manufacturing or 3D printing. A very well-known technology is photo polymerization, which is also known as SLA, stereolithography.

That’s something that you definitely see in a lot of desktop technologies. You also have a very common desktop technology called FPM, fused position modeling. That is in the end, what you see with a nozzle and a fine filament where layer by layer you then create new objects. You have material jetting, which jets the material directly similar to a printer, but there is also a printer technology called binder jetting that is getting more and more popular for some prototyping technologies. On the metal side, the most popular and common technologies for production applications are powder bed fusion. Powder bed fusion means that your base material is a powder and you have different energy sources that melt the material in order to allow you to build up a part layer by layer.

We as EOS work with the DMLS process, so direct metal laser solidification, but also very similar processes, such as selective phase centering on the polymer side are definitely available. When it comes to materials, a similar topic, we can talk for hours; but we’ll sum it up in a minute. As I mentioned earlier, with polymer materials there are some very common materials such as nylon 11, nylon 12, or polyamide 11 and 12. There are also some more elastomeric materials such as TPE and TPU that are getting quite common, if you look at shoes and the more consumer-based industry. But there is also a very, very commonly known material, such as polypropylene. On the metal side, think of any material in theory that is weldable from aluminum to titanium to gold, but all the way also into coppers that are definitely printable and are increasing in volume quite significantly.

Jim:

Fabian, I want to loop back and talk about the materials, because of course that’s essential to this technology. In terms of the machines themselves, it sounds like there are sort of generic differences in the approaches to part making in this case. In some cases, you have a bed of powder and then you add energy to it to melt it, and then allow it to re-solidify in a pattern that produces your part. And it sounds like in other ways, we actually take the raw material and we add it externally to the bed and build it that way. But you also described another type where we actually change the state of the product; instead of just melting it, we actually polymerize it. We start from a liquid monomer and then make a solid. These are radically different ways of making parts. Is there a specific advantage to one technique over the other that we can say, universally, this is the best way?

Fabian:

That’s a really good question. And ultimately, no, you really have to look at your own application. You really have to look at your requirements and then have these requirements drive your decision towards an additive manufacturing system. If you look at the whole market, we can say that DMLS or powder bed fusion technologies are most used for industrial applications. Here we’re talking about restrictive industries, but also more consumer-based industries, and that accounts for metal and for polymer applications. We definitely see powder based technologies winning the race when it comes to industrial adoption of the technology.

Patrick:

If you look into these seven different technologies, the main difference between these technologies is on one hand, the source material, as you mentioned it. And on the other hand, it is the fusing energy source that is the main difference. If you ask me, can you really pick out one for a specific use case as Fabian mentioned? Not really. I always say to my engineers, start with the problem you want to solve, find the right solution and work backwards to the technology. If you start with the technology and work backwards to the solution, you most often fail. Technology is just a vehicle, and you should really put most of your effort into the right solution for a problem. In general, additive manufacturing is not a new technology, so I also looked into the history. This technology has been around for almost 30 years. All these technologies popped up in the late 1980s and the early 1990s. What has changed today is the achievable quality and quantity. We have reached industrial grade, and technology has become mature and suitable for mass production. That’s the main change.

Jim:

Patrick, I’m glad you brought up that notion of start with the problem and then develop the solution. So many hundreds of thousands of manufacturers in America alone use CNC machining as a primary production technology because it is well understood. The history of that technology was very similar. In many cases, firms bought the technology because it was exciting and new, and then went looking for something to do with it, rather than the correct method as you described there. But can you tell me what are the benefits of using additive technologies, 3D technologies, compared to the subtractive technologies that so many manufacturers are used to, like machining?

Patrick:

Actually, there are plenty of them. There are many benefits that you read and hear about. Categorizing them can make it a bit easier to identify how AM can benefit your organization. Just to name a few, first I would say responsible and high performance design. With additive manufacturing, you can really go for performance-driven designs rather than technology-driven designs. Sometimes you limit yourself by the technology given. Additive manufacturing just changed the game; you can focus on performance and that drives your design. What I mean with performance-driven design is that it’s lightweight, functional, has part integration, complex structures and, of course, significantly faster R&D lead times. That’s also big advantage. The second point to mention is responsible and high performance value and supply chain. A very valuable and broad use case is the supply chain for spare parts on demand. If you go for additive, you can get rid of storage, you can get rid of shipping tasks, you can get rid of packaging tasks. You can really produce your components in the moment of need and not in store.

Jim:

That’s an interesting approach. I’m thinking of perhaps spares for industrial equipment, for example. It’s an interesting concept, that you could perhaps be a machinery manufacturer and rather than ship a replacement part across the nation, you would have it made locally and eliminate that air freight component?

Patrick:

Absolutely. This is what we call distributed manufacturing. Produce decentralized. Just take Aero as an example. Aero spends millions of dollars in storage. So here, additive manufacturing really is disrupting this spare part industry.

Fabian:

And Jim, look at the implications for today’s world. We now all know we live in a world where we have significant supply chain disruptions and challenges. We live in a world where climate change is really driving companies to be forced into innovating faster and faster and faster. That’s where additive manufacturing really comes into the game, enabling organizations to think differently about part design. As Patrick said, think about complex geometries like this one. They could never be built in any other technology before, and it now enables completely new solutions. And yeah, ultimately it will allow us as a human race to respond quicker to events that were unforeseen and will therefore hopefully allow us to also build a more resilient manufacturing and supply chain that is backed by a digital value chain on the backend. One that is also enabled by 5G, by Internet of Things technologies. So it’s not only AM, but AM is a quite significant part of these new advances.

Jim:

Fabian, you’ve briefly showed us a very exotic-looking part. And of course, the hallmark of AM is the ability to make parts which cannot be made with any other technology. I come from the automotive industry, and heat exchangers are a fundamental part of that industry. They are in aerospace the same way, of course, and that’s a big one. In conventional manufacturing technologies, we’re really limited to conventional geometric shapes, tubes and fins, tube and shell heat exchangers. But you can do some very interesting things if you have unlimited ability to change the shapes, can you not?

Fabian:

Yes, of course, and as Patrick mentioned, the only restriction we have in that case is the human mind. We need to break out of our conventional way of thinking, out of our conventional restrictive thinking about what the technology allows us to do, and really challenge the things that we’ve done for the past 10,000 years, right? Casting has been around for 10,000 years and the process hasn’t really changed that much. So yeah, heat exchangers can impact the automotive and the aerospace industry, but look at server farms, right? They typically cooled through air cooling. Now we can implement liquid cooling that really touches on the hotspots of the CPU and therefore increases the performance, but also the sustainability of these data centers. So really yes, challenging the status quo and utilizing the benefits of additive manufacturing towards the fullest extent. That’s when we really see the impact.

Jim:

After that, I can see you’re ready to jump in.

Patrick:

Yeah, I’m ready to jump in. You’ve seen it, right. I always brand my employers, saying, “Hey guys, if you can sync it up, you can print it.” That’s the mindset I want to see in my team. I also created some major learning, because in the past years I’ve seen thousands of applications and one of my major learnings was that the best AM use cases were usually invented from scratch. And that brings me to my second major learning, that redesigning a conventionally manufactured part into an additive part is the second-best option. Start from scratch. And finally, typical 3D printing applications that you mentioned cannot be produced in a conventional way. So this is how I set up my teams to really be disruptive and innovative.

Jim:

Now, for those of us that come from manufacturing, one problem was always what we call the gray area, and the gray area meant the customer that wants 200 parts. Not two parts, not 20,000 parts, but perhaps 200 or 20. A number which is too many to build individually by hand, but they’re too few to justify making injection molds or production levels of tooling. The result was often that we would tell the customer, “We’ll give you a price for 200, but why not buy 2,000 because the price is roughly the same, because most of the cost is in tooling to make those 20s. So you may as well purchase a large number, or conversely that it would simply be cost-prohibitive to make them individually one by one.” Is additive a way to sort of bridge that gap between the build parts one at a time versus the high cost of tooling to make them in mass production?

Fabian:

Yeah, for sure. That’s what we call the long-tail and the short-tail production impact of additive manufacturing. As you mentioned earlier, you can use additive manufacturing to ramp up your production, get yourself ready to also understand the consumer demand. If it is there, you can flip the switch to convince the manufacturing, but also then use it for the long tail. Right? Aftermarket parts as you just mentioned, minimum order quantities, a huge restriction challenge to organizations that have to keep parts in stock in the automotive or bus industry for 15 to 30 years. Now, if we look at manufacturing production, on demand for these long-tail parts definitely adds a significant value. Now incorporating that with what Patrick said, keeping additive manufacturing in mind at the early stage of product development, then you get the benefits of the freedom of design and the freedom of supply chain. And that really unlocks some new benefits.

Jim:

Patrick, we’ve been talking about part making specifically in manufacturing. Of course, we’re seeing a rapid increase in automation. And the one thing that’s not widely understood about robotic automation is that it actually dramatically increases, in most cases, the need for fixturing and tooling. Human beings are very dexterous with their hands at this point. Robotics machines very often need other devices to help them manipulate and handle parts, and fixturing and tooling is a surprisingly high proportion of the cost of manufactured goods. Is that a place where we see additive being useful?

Patrick:

Actually, additive can be useful in any industry. You just named one. To give you a short introduction, let’s take the tooling branch and in a tooling branch, it is all about cycle time and cooling. So that’s the driver, that’s the game-changer in tooling. With additive, you can enable more even cooling, making it possible to shorten cycle times and this then is the business case. So if we talk about tooling, additive manufacturing has a place, has a value for the industry.

Patrick:

If you look at medical, medical is also a very interesting industry for additive because here we have a wide range of sizes of medical devices. Let’s take orthotics, as an example. Usually when you need to have an orthotics and you are at a young age, you grow up and that means the orthotics have to grow with you. And just imagine, too, how you have to do that with tooling. It is almost impossible, though. 3D printing in orthotics and prosthetics or implants has a high value for the medical branch. In consumer products, you see that customization here is the driver for eyewear, for footwear, for whatever wear you can imagine. So that’s the drive for the consumer. I could just continue for automotive and aerospace, but my main message is that any industry can benefit from additive when it starts with the right mindset, finding the right application.

Jim:

Yes, the ultimate in low-volume high-mix, I suppose, are in the surgically implantable materials sector where in a perfect world, every artificial hip or knee would be custom designed specifically for the one patient instead of the two or three sizes-fits-all that we’ve known historically. But I’m thinking also about aerospace. Aerospace is a place with hot section gas turbine blades, for example. Very, very complex part, very high-value part, perhaps $10,000 for a single part or 20. Often investment cast, post-machined and these days, laser drilled, for example, to get the necessary cooling air for film cooling applications. If an individual were to say, “I want to switch to an additive technology to make that component part,” can they make it with the same design they used for conventional technologies? Or must they go and redesign the part from scratch to make it work with additive? Fabian?

Fabian:

That’s a really good question. And as in additive, it’s often the case that the answer is that it depends. Ultimately yes, you can typically use conventional designs and print these designs. Is it the best solution? Probably not, as Patrick mentioned. But it is possible. It most likely will force you to increase your efforts in the post-processing procedures. You’ll have a lot of support structures in the example that you just mentioned, but you mentioned the aerospace industry, you mentioned aerospace turbine components. We’re not always allowed to talk about these highly confidential projects. What I am able to talk about, though, is one organization’s project in a similar space. And that is the Siemens energy team. They have made some really strong advancements in their sector, and one thing that they have done is that they printed a majority of gas turbine components.

Fabian:

This gas turbine has recently fulfilled more than 1,000,000 operating hours within the Siemens team. And that means in the words of Siemens, if you can print a turbine blade, you can pretty much print anything. I think that says a lot. They were able to achieve the same and not even of the same, but a superior performance of their turbine components. For them, they have reached the point of no return, and that means that the parts they’re now designing for these turbines can only be 3D printed. They cannot be manufactured in any other conventional way, and that propels them into the next age, into the new systems for their industry sector.

Patrick:

I would add that if you just copy designs from a conventional manufactured part, you often cannot compete price-wise. Take sheet metal, as an example. If you produce a sheet metal in a conventional way, it is quite cheap today. If you take the same sheet metal printed in additive, you cannot compete cost-wise. So what additive has to do and is able to do, is that it can add value, it can add performance, it can add function. To think in sub-assemblies, it can reduce components because we can integrate functionalities. We can print functional parts. Not only static parts; we can even print movable and functional parts. So adding value, that’s the main purpose of additive.

Fabian:

That’s a good point, Patrick. Just to add one more sentence to that. Because oftentimes other manufacturing is referring to a technology that is typically a high cost technology and that is only feasible for, as you said it Jim, high-mix low-volume.

But we’re definitely seeing these high volume applications coming up more and more. We’re currently working on a project with an automotive customer that goes into the millions of parts annually, and that’s a metal part. We talk about the medical industry where in certain implant sectors, more than 30 to 40% of implants are 3D printed. They’re not customized yet, but the benefit of other manufacturing, as in this hip cup case of an osteoporotic structure, is really the big impact driver. So we’re definitely moving out of the low volume jigs and fixtures, maybe one-off tooling parts and we are moving in, as we said in the beginning, to the high production of additive.

Jim:

Well, Fabian, I’m glad you brought that up, because the traditional concern amongst manufacturers looking at additive is the process is very slow. It’s very constrained by physics. You have to put energy in, you’ve got to build this part sort of layer by layer at the same time. There are others who say yes, but if the build envelope is large enough, you can simply make the parts using the entire three dimensional sort of volume available and simply make many parts slowly, but cumulatively the time per part is competitive with other processes. How much is speed a factor in deciding whether additive is the right process for your part?

Fabian:

Speed is always a factor, right? Speed is king, and everybody wants to spend less money than they have to. Ultimately, it also really depends on the application and the industry. If you look at the space industry right now, space is exploding, right? We have space companies popping up everywhere. Every space company in North America, but I would even lean out the window and say by now globally, uses additive manufacturing for the most critical parts, whether it’s the combustion chamber or certain injection and injection applications.

That’s really where additive manufacturing can excel right now. Why? Because the restrictions aren’t as limited as they are in the conventional aerospace industry, where I still have to go through quite restrictive procedures to get my parts approved. So the space industry is kind of showing us where the aerospace industry or the aeronautics industry is going to go in the next few years.

That being said, speed is always king of course, but combining speed with smart design can really give you the overall advantage. If you think about this heat exchanger that I showed earlier, if you print this with so-called standard process parameters which defines, as you mentioned, the layer thickness of my powder, it defines how fast the laser runs over my material. If I combine that knowledge with design knowledge, I can speed up processes by up to 70%. But not adjusting or adding more lasers, not by adding a faster recoding system. Just by understanding the interaction between a laser or an energy source, and the material and the design. That’s really where knowledge and experience of engineers comes into the game, that really then has and will make the difference between a positive business case and not a positive business case.

Patrick:

Patrick, I would like to add one perspective in this regard. So speed is a factor. That’s why all companies acting in this additive manufacturing industry try to speed up. By adding lasers by creating and developing smarter materials and smarter processes. But I usually say, if you just look for cost per part, just for the additive part of the process, this is just a part of the truth.

I try to treat my customers and my employees to think in the end-to-end life cycle of a product. You may be more expensive in just producing the part, but just imagine, you can get rid of packaging transport, you can make assembly easier, you can increase the lifetime. So the total cost of ownership can be 10 times cheaper than conventionally, but just the production of the additive part can be two times more expensive. But in total it’s 10 times more cheap. So really, think about the entire process.

Jim:

Patrick, you mentioned the engineering aspect and we’ve talked about part design, designing parts that optimize the benefits of additive. But when you’re building with additive, of course, how you build the part matters. The orientation of the part in the build. Support structures that may be necessary if you’re building large numbers of parts, and perhaps the processes you use after the build to remove the parts from the support structures. How different is the design engineering process to build for additive compared to making the part for other technologies? Do you have to retrain your engineers to a great extent?

Patrick:

Entirely. It’s here in the same case. You better start from scratch when you want to become a designer. It really takes decades to change the mind, so if you are treated and trained by conventional manufacturing and you switch to additive, it really takes years to lift the entire potential of additive. So, usually it is better to start from scratch. The conversion of conventional to additive takes time. It really takes time.

Jim:

Fabian, you are the youngest man in the group of the three of us having this conversation here. What I see very frequently, especially small and medium size manufacturing enterprises, is that when a new technology is introduced to the works, often a young engineer is tasked to be sort of the front-person to be the advocate for that technology and is tasked with learning it extensively, and becomes the champion for that technology. Is that the way forward for introducing additive to a manufacturing firm, do you think? Is it to find a champion and then make them sort of the leader of that group?

Fabian:

It’s definitely not the wrong approach. Sometimes I think we don’t do engineers enough justice as the additive manufacturing industry. Sometimes there are things that are said, like that engineers just don’t get it. They just don’t understand it. They don’t want to change.  They don’t want to learn a new technology. I think that’s actually completely wrong. Engineers, from their intrinsic motivation, want to challenge the existing, they want to try out new things. They want to create new unknowns that they were never able to do before.

Fabian:

So yes, it can be a young engineer. It can be a very experienced engineer. I think what’s important, and even more important than identifying one person, is identifying a cross-functional team across your organization that really is able to assess work and additive manufacturing, to have the biggest impact across our value chain.

And if we look at the most successful organizations out there, they really have implemented additive manufacturing successfully in production. They start out with a small nucleus and we call that the transformation team. That includes R&D. It includes manufacturing. It includes procurement, to have all these functions in one room to make the decision. Which parts make sense? Where do we have a positive business case? And most importantly, how can we use this technology to propel ourselves forward into more innovative applications, but also distinguish ourselves from our competition?

That’s really when you then see, after the first project, a self-momentum starting out where you create a pull within the organization. All of a sudden you’ve created this curiosity with another engineering team, and everybody wants to jump on the train. And that is, to me, the most important step is to create this awareness and this pull effect.

Jim:

Patrick, for engineering professionals of our generation, it’s very frequent that the engineering manager or the owner of the works is not directly involved in drafting or design at the street level or at the works level. How much do they need to know about additive to make a sensible decision about purchasing a technology? Is that something which has to be outsourced or do I need to hire a consultant, for example, to come in and tell me how I can move forward with additive?

Patrick:

Actually, that’s a good approach. So for example, within my company, we have a team of almost 50 consultants acting worldwide to really create awareness, also to the management level, because often the management level can be a show-stopper. So mindset change starts in the C-level, I would even say. Mindset change starts in C-level and then goes down to the working level.

That’s why consultancy really is a valuable and highly beneficial role in that industry. But I would like to come back to Fabian’s arguments. He said, I think we have to be even earlier into the education circle, in universities. We really have to look into universities, because I’ve just read a recent Deloitte study, and that Deloitte study showed very clearly that we are today almost lacking 500,000 jobs in manufacturing because we don’t have the experts. How can we overcome that?

And one answer is that universities have to incorporate AM into engineering material science and digital production classes. We really have to start earlier. That’s why we and the academy put in lots of effort, and have the strategic goal to look into global universities to start educating the youngsters, the next professionals. We have to start earlier. That’s my message.

Jim:

Gentlemen, there’s so much to talk about in this technology. We could talk about this for hours and I hope we’ll have a chance to talk about it more in the future. But to conclude, let me ask a fundamental question. How can a manufacturer who is not using additive, potentially a small or medium-sized manufacturer, but knows that they should investigate it? What is the first thing? Is there one piece of advice that you could give them so that they can begin this process, this journey? Patrick, I’ll start with you.

Patrick:

I have advice: Start with an achievable project. Even before that, screen your portfolio. Make a portfolio screening, identifying based on economic and technical fit. Find the pearls. Find the diamonds. Find the nuggets. And then start small, start with an achievable project, create success, and then build on that. In the best case, be guided and supported by consultants.

Jim:

Fabian.

Fabian:

Yeah. I first of all second what Patrick said. It’s super important to start with an achievable project. Reaching for the stars is good, but make sure you stop by at the moon on your way to the stars.

The second next thing to do is really education, right? Educate yourself as a leader. Really understand, as we discussed in the beginning, what are the technologies out there. What are the benefits of additive manufacturing? What are the limitations and what is achievable? Right?

If we start with an operational excellence project to lower cost, maybe additive manufacturing is not the right technology. If we’re trying to push into a new, innovative technology by utilizing additive manufacturing, that could be a good first step.

Educate yourself really well around the capabilities of the technology. You can do that through various resources online. As we said, we have the Additive Minds Academy that offers super comprehensive e-learning. There are some other players out there, that are also from universities, offering some really good content. You can tune into the Additive Snack Podcast, where we interview the industry leaders that really give some good tips and tricks on how to start out with additive manufacturing, where they have seen success within their own organization. So education, achievable project and then the rest really is going to fall into place.

Jim:

Patrick Schrade, Fabian Alefeld, EOS. Thanks for joining me on the program.

Fabian:

Thank you.

Jim:

And thank you for joining us on this episode of Manufacturing the Future. See you next time.