The partnership harnesses Advanta’s digital simulation solutions for Morf3D’s new Long Beach facility.
Morf3D, Inc., a metal additive manufacturing provider, is expanding beyond its established facility in El Segundo, Calif. A subsidiary of Nikon Corporation, Morf3D functions as a service integrator, taking client applications and producing them with different materials using various machines and degrees of complexity.
According to Ivan Madera, Morf3D’s CEO, the company approaches additive manufacturing with the flexibility to cater to a wider range of clients. For example, while the company’s earliest customers were mainly aerospace OEMs and defense contractors, today, 70 percent are from the rapidly expanding private space industry.
The broader array of clients means more significant variability in the components produced, and to scale up to meet this demand, a new facility was needed. As a result, the company has a 90,000-square-foot facility currently under construction in Long Beach called the Applied Digital Manufacturing Center (ADMC), which is intended to drive the industrialization of digital manufacturing in high-growth markets.
A vital aspect of the project is a partnership with Siemens Advanta to leverage its advanced design and digital twin simulation software to provide a simulation of how the new factory will operate as well as various production scenarios.
“Morf3D is experiencing growth at a rapid rate. We wanted to make sure that our factory was flexible and that we had a team able to understand the challenges that we might face, not just today, but in the future too,” Madera says of the partnership.
One of the primary purposes of the partnership is to reduce the complexity of scaling additive manufacturing. Madera says that Advanta has brought essential lessons from other facility projects it has worked on, with each one providing new unique scenarios to learn from.
At the Long Beach facility, Advanta’s tools will enable Morf3D to efficiently cater to customer requests, such as increasing initial production from a batch of 10 components to 1,000 by simulating the whole process and what it would mean for factory operations to achieve it.
The simulation tools are especially conducive as many parts used in the space industry are complex, like heat exchangers and combustion chambers for rockets. In addition, some larger, more complex structures necessitate additive manufacturing to yield a level of performance that legacy manufacturing can’t deliver, according to Madera.
“The traditional method requires a lot of micro-welding, inspection and potential failure points,” Madera says. “With AM, it’s one structure that can still have complexity but doesn’t have the same challenges or levels of complexity with the inspection side.”
For example, in the case of combustion chambers or propulsion systems with fluid channels through thins walls, traditional manufacturing would require a lengthy and expensive process filled with micro welds and inspection points. Whereas, with additive manufacturing, the process is much simpler.
One of the goals of Morf3D is to dispel the notion that additive manufacturing can’t scale. According to Madera, that’s only true if scaling is just approached by trying to add more capacity. Instead, he says the crux of the matter is the effective integration of data from emerging technologies. Morf3D is working on tackling this through its partnership with Advanta, whose digital twin simulation and digital factory tools will help with both data collection and UX.
Additionally, with Nikon as a majority shareholder, Morf3D can harness its inspection capabilities, digital tools and vision systems to integrate into the production life cycle.
“If you can really integrate these things with the help of partnerships and technology, bringing levels of automation to the process—you can scale AM, wrapping it into an end-to-end solution,” Madera says.
In June, a phased production roll-out will begin for the Long Beach facility, with subsequent phases expanding the facility’s operational footprint. At full capacity, the center is projected to be one of the largest aerospace additive manufacturing solution integrators in the U.S., with 150 multidiscipline engineers, research staff and technical teams.
