3D PRINTING & ADDITIVE MANUFACTURING INTELLIGENCE

MAG
EUROPE EDITION
VOLUME 29 ISSUE 1
www.tctmagazine.com

THE YEAR
OF BINDER JET
WITH AN INFLUX OF NEW SYSTEMS EXPECTED,
EXONE SAYS 2021 IS BINDER JET’S YEAR.

SUPPLY CHAIN SOFTWARE CREATIVE

The opportunities & challenges A look at the industry’s latest Fine jewellery design
for AM software developments & bespoke architecture
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Combination of electrochemical pulse methods,
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Additive Manufacturing
surfaces@rena.com rena.at
 VOLUME 29 ISSUE 1
ISSN 1751-0333

EDITORIAL
HEAD OF CONTENT
Laura Griffiths e: laura.griffiths@rapidnews.com t: + 44 1244 952 389
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FROM THE EDITOR
LAURA GRIFFITHS
Business
as usual?
It’s highly (and hopefully) unlikely
any of us will ever have another
year like 2020 – though these
first few weeks into the new year
have sort of felt like a hazy 2020
hangover.
Almost overnight our routines were
skewed; our dining tables turned
into desks, we became Zoom
tech support for distant relatives
and lamented the former ease
of locating a travel sized bottle
of hand gel. I experimented with
“pyjama chic” on impromptu video
calls, spent evenings remotely
attending international conferences
while enjoying the novelty of
secretly tucking into a McDonalds
Uber Eats delivery. I even did the
unthinkable and started watching
Selling Sunset.
Yet, perhaps the most interesting
consequence for me was getting
to view 2020 through the lens of
the additive manufacturing (AM)
industry. As supply chains were
disrupted and PPE demand soared,
the pandemic presented a unique
challenge that AM was uniquely
equipped to tackle. Leveraging
the benefits of rapid product
development, mass customisation
and decentralised manufacture, for
some industries and crucially on the
frontline, AM provided a temporary
lifeline and, as we explore in more
detail on page 11, encouraged
overdue conversations about
supply chain resilience.
Places like the UK’s Digital
Manufacturing Centre, which we
paid a remote visit on page 28,
believe AM has a huge part to
play in industry recovery and the
coming year will be a real proof
point of whether that enthusiasm
from the editor
and goodwill has opened up
eyes to additive for the long-term.
While a return to normality sounds
wonderful right now, business as
usual needn’t be the default setting
going forward.
So onto our first issue of 2021. I
don’t think we intended for this
issue to be a binder jet special but
based on conversations our Senior
Content Producer Sam Davies and
I have held with various figures
over the last few months, that’s kind
of what we’ve landed on. So, let’s
agree it was intentional, eh?
On the cover, ExOne declares 2021
as ‘the year of binder jet’ and as
new machines from major players
like Desktop Metal, HP and GE
Additive are expected to expand
the scope for binder jet hardware
over the coming months, there’s
good reason to believe this to
be the case. To find out how the
rest of the industry is prepping
for this oncoming trend, we
spoke to a number of companies
about how they’re shoring up
software capabilities to tackle
the technology’s most complex
challenges.
Elsewhere, we’ve got conversations
on entrepreneurship with
newcomer Hyperganic and AM
application in creative industries
with jewellery maker Jenny
Wu and Aectual Co-founder
Hedwig Heinsman. Plus, stories on
certification and useful advice on
creating a business case for AM
shared by Phil Reeves in our regular
Expert Advisory Board column slot.
Enjoy the issue and stay safe.
29.1 / www.tctmagazine.com / 05
Join our Visionary Live Talk
March 17th 2021
9 AM and 4 PM CET
Register now
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Visionary Talk
Co-create the Future of
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Dr. Marco Nock Michael Jan Galba Dr. Daniel Riedmüller Fatime Imetovska
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 ISSUE 1
VOLUME 29
COVER STORY 23

11
Software &
8
8. THE YEAR OF
BINDER JET
ExOne explains why
Simulation
2021 is a turning point for 23. ENABLING CMF WITH 3MF
the technology it brought Stratasys on enabling CMF simulation
to market more than with full colour 3D printing. 31
20 years ago. 24. FINDING A ‘RITHM
Sam interviews Hyperganic CEO Lin NEWS
11 SUPPLY CHAIN
Kayser about his vision for algorithm-
based design.
31. AM INDUSTRY NEWS
A look at some of the biggest industry
26. BIND-AND-SOFTWARE developments at the start of 2021.
11. THE ROLE OF 3D PRINTING
In the ‘year of binder jet’ Laura explores
IN FUTURE SUPPLY CHAINS
the software advances promising to
The TCT content team talks to industry
maximise the technology’s production
leading personnel to understand why 3D
printing makes sense for supply chain
capabilities.
Expert 34
resiliency. Advisory
Through
14. SUPPLY CHAIN COMPLEXITY:
AM IN THE POST COVID-19 ERA
28 the Doors
Column
University of Bristol’s Dr. Jennifer Johns 34. UNDERSTANDING THE
offers her insights on supply chain as a 28. THE BIG KW SPECIAL INVESTMENT CASE FOR AM
reader in International Business. PROJECT Industry consultant Phil Reeves on why
We take a look inside the new Digital understanding the business case for
Manufacturing Centre at Silverstone AM is important.
CREATIVE 17 Park in the UK.

17. DIVINE DESIGN Standards & 30

Sam talks to Indian service bureau Certification 8
Imaginarium about a record-breaking
diamond ring. 30. GETTING UP TO STANDARD
Burloak Technologies on the long
18. FINE LINES road to becoming a certified AM
LACE founder Jenny Wu sits down with supplier to Boeing.
TCT to discuss her use of 3D printing to
produce jewellery pieces.

20. AECTUALLY, IT’S 3D PRINTED 18

Laura speaks to a company using
3D printing for bespoke architectural
projects.
 THE YEAR OF
BINDER JET
At least five new production metal binder jet
systems are expected this year from ExOne, HP,
Desktop Metal and GE, with more likely to follow.

I
n the early years, few engineers thought it would
be possible to simply inkjet binder onto powder
and deliver high-density metal parts. For most of
the two decades that followed the original 1993
binder jet patent from MIT, that conventional wisdom
reigned.

The ExOne Company, which was the original licensee

of MIT’s binder jet patents for metal, went on to launch
the first metal binder jet system in 1998 and continued
to print metals on increasingly sophisticated machines
without any direct competition for years. With as-
printed part densities hovering at about 55-60%,
binder jetting metal was viewed as a niche process
with limited potential. ExOne had to infiltrate its printed
metal parts with another metal to fill in the gaps.

That all changed in 2013, when ExOne finally cracked

the code on binder jetting metals to high densities, or
those greater than 97%, during a joint R&D project with
an aerospace company. The team thought if they could
just print the finest available powders, the particles
would compact, or order themselves, more densely.
The challenge with that, of course, is that these
powders don’t flow easily like grains of sand; they
clump together like baking flour and are difficult to flow
and spread evenly. But the project was successful, and
the news spread quickly.

Even after ExOne filed patents on its invention,

however, it took the company several years to get
the first commercially viable high-density metal 3D
printer — the Innovent — to market in 2016. One of the
biggest challenges was figuring out how to automate
dispensing, spreading and compacting the powders.

The year after the Innovent launch was a big one for
binder jetting: Digital Metal, a subsidiary of Höganäs,
launched production of the DM P2500. Desktop
Metal announced plans for its Production System. GE
announced it would produce its own binder jet system.
In 2018, HP announced its Metal Jet Fusion binder
jetting system.

While the Digital Metal printer has been available

since then, this year – 2021 – is the year that all those
5TOP: 3FROM THE COVER
EXONE INNOVENTPRO IN 2021, THE NEW EXONE
other binder jet printers are slated to come to market. METAL BINDER JET LINEUP
5ABOVE: WILL INCLUDE (LEFT TO RIGHT)
EXONE’S MATERIAL THE X1 25PRO, ALREADY
What’s more, ExOne also launches a new version PORTFOLIO NOW OFFERS IN USE WORLDWIDE, THE
of the system that jump-started the sector, with its MORE THAN 20 MATERIALS INNOVENTPRO AND X1 160PRO

08 / www.tctmagazine.com / 29.1

InnoventPro to be offered in a 3L
and 5L size. Binder jetting is having
such a moment, in fact, it wouldn’t be
“Binder jet is surprising if other companies jumped
in.
well on its way to “We really do believe this year is a
disrupting other
turning point for binder jet 3D printing,”
said John Hartner, ExOne’s CEO. “We
manufacturing
see an increasing number of customers
looking into how binder jet can help
their business, whether it’s delivering
technologies.” lightweight parts, higher performance
parts, or even decentralising their
supply chain. It’s a truly exciting time,
and we see the whole field growing.”
THE LURE OF BINDER JET
One of the reasons the lure of binder
jetting has never really vanished, even
though many doubted its ability to print
high-density metal, is simple: speed.
In the complex field of additive
manufacturing technologies, binder
jetting is the most similar to paper
printing and regarded as one of the
fastest methods for volumetric output.
In binder jetting, an industrial
printhead quickly inkjets binder
(essentially a glue) onto a thin layer
of powder particles – metal, sand or
ceramic – creating a solid part one layer
at a time. When printing metals, the final
part must later be sintered in order to
SHOWN:
PRODUCTION METAL BINDER JET PARTS
fuse the particles together.
When looking at metal 3D printing
alone, almost every other method builds
parts with a single point, either a laser
or nozzle, that struggles to compete
with a printhead. Multi-laser or multi-
nozzle systems have grown increasingly
common but, generally, adding those
points isn’t as affordable as expanding a
row of printheads.
“All technologies have their sweet
spot, and binder jetting was really built
for high throughput,” Hartner said.
“Though we expect it to take time,
binder jet is well on its way to disrupting
other manufacturing technologies.”
INCREDIBLE MATERIAL
FLEXIBILITY
Virtually any powder can be 3D
printed in binder jetting so long as the
right binder chemistry and sintering
recipe can be developed and optimised
to densify the printed part.
At ExOne, the company has printed
everything from traditional MIM
powders to concrete, trash and more.
REFERENCE
1
Mirzababaei, S., Paul, B.K. & Pasebani, S. Metal Powder Recyclability Creating bound powder designs is the
in Binder Jet Additive Manufacturing. JOM 72, 3070–3079 (2020). easy part, with optimising recipes taking
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11837-020-04258-6 the most time.
29.1 / www.tctmagazine.com / 09
COVER STORY
Most of the new binder jetting
systems that come to market in
2021 will arrive with stainless steel
alloys, most often 316L and 17-4PH,
but more materials are expected to
follow. Digital Metal already offers
at least six materials.
ExOne's material portfolio now
offers more than 20 materials,
including 11 single-alloy metals.
That includes 17-4PH, 304L,
316L, M2 Tool Steel, Inconel 718,
Cobalt Chrome, Copper, H13 Tool
Steel, Inconel 625, Titanium and
Tungsten Heavy Alloy. Aluminium,
which is already qualified for
R&D use on ExOne systems, has
been fast-tracked for third-party
qualification status, which indicates
general market readiness. ExOne’s
first aluminium alloys are expected
to receive this status upgrade
during 2021.
SUSTAINABILITY DRIVES
BINDER JETTING
While most 3D printing
technologies can call themselves
green for their ability to deliver
consolidated, lightweight parts
and other benefits, binder jetting
stands alone in one important
respect: it can deliver a bigger
impact.
The ability to produce high
volumes of sustainable designs
means that the technology can
deliver sweeping benefits when
it comes to lighter parts that can
help decarbonise cars and other
products. In fact, ExOne routinely
delivers consolidated parts that are
redesigned for up to 40% weight
savings. What’s more, research has
already shown that binder jetting
has a material efficiency of up to
96%1.
ExOne also recently joined the
Additive Manufacturer Green
Trade Association to support
independent research into benefits
like these so manufacturers can
have data about the environmental
impact of binder jetting. “Our
team is confident about the
broad sustainability benefits
of binder jet,” Hartner said.
“Whether it’s waste reduction,
part consolidation, lightweighting
or enabling decentralised
manufacturing, we’re a company
that is truly dedicated to our
values and vision of Sustainable
Manufacturing Without Limitations.”
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 SUPPLY CHAIN

THE ROLE OF 3D
PRINTING IN FUTURE
SUPPLY CHAINS
Sam & Laura speak to several industry personnel to understand the potential
role of 3D printing technology in more agile manufacturing supply chains.

I
n California, a collaborative effort
involving Forecast 3D takes just
three months to go from design
development of a nasopharyngeal
swab to additively manufacturing a million
FDA-approved units.

In South Carolina, Johnson & Johnson’s

(J&J) Ethicon brand works with PRISMA
Health to additively manufacture an FDA-
authorised ventilator expansion splitter
that enables a single ventilator to be used
for two rescuable COVID-19 patients until
individual ventilators come available. “After COVID,
In Texas, Essentium designs a 3D nobody can say
failures are not
printable face mask that is additively
manufactured tens of thousands of
times over ten weeks before its injection
moulding tooling is ready, and a more anticipated.”
traditional method can shoulder the burden.
And then it keeps printing supplementary
masks alongside.

There were many more examples all

over the world of 3D printing filling gaps of
stretched supply chains as the COVID-19
pandemic caused disruptions from the Far
East to the West Coast. It quickly sparked
conversations about the need for more
agile and resilient supply chains, and in this
industry, how important 3D printing is to the
transformation of these supply networks.
Manager of 3D Printing, Ramon Pastor, noted
how the ‘resiliency of a supply chain is the
resiliency of the worst part of said supply chain.’
Around 12 months ago, as offshore factories
closed down as a result of the spread of
COVID-19, manufacturing organisations around
the world learnt that the hard way.

For Steve Richardson, Forecast 3D’s COMPLEX CONSIDERATIONS

Business Development Manager who
focused on supply chain development
on an international scale while in the
electronics industry, there’s much that
needs to go into a supply chain to make
it agile – “you have to have visibility
throughout the value stream, knowing that
you have one focal point, normally the OEM,
orchestrating all the different pieces, and
we have to have data-driven decisions.” –
but having seen up close the capabilities
of 3D printing, he is in no doubt that it has
its place: “What I really took away from the
pandemic was how dynamic the supply
chain can be with additive manufacturing.”
Speaking to TCT in the autumn of 2020,
having surveyed 2,000 manufacturing
business leaders about trends in digital
manufacturing, HP’s World Wide General
In the 2019 Global Services Location Index,
which lists the most attractive locations
to produce goods, India, China, Malaysia,
Indonesia and Vietnam topped the rankings,
with Thailand joining the United States and
United Kingdom in the top eight. Notably,
though the US and UK excelled in ‘people
skills and availability’, ‘business environment’
and ‘digital resonance’, they lacked in ‘financial
attractiveness’.
Because so much emphasis has been placed
on lowering costs within many manufacturing
organisations, the effectiveness and resiliency
in many cases had been neglected. As
Richardson pointed out, “If a company has a
mindset of, ‘we’re going to be low cost’, every
decision that supply chain makes is based
on having the lowest cost product in the
market.” Companies and entire industries were
rocked upon the spread of COVID-19. In a
Deloitte survey carried out last year, 59% of
respondents said they saw a slowdown in
sales and challenges to their cash flow, with
22% noting their inability to directly serve
customers was the main negative impact on
their business during the pandemic.
“COVID caused every company in the
world to look at their supply chain and say,
‘I can’t tolerate this, I have to have more
flexibility,’” said 3D Systems CEO Jeff Graves
in a recent interview with TCT.

29.1 / www.tctmagazine.com / 011

 “Nobody could have anticipated COVID,”
LEO Lane Co-founder and VP, Business
Dr Lee-Bath Nelson offered, “but after
COVID nobody can say that failures are not
anticipated. You have to take measures for
that.”
The strategy of manufacturing parts
offshore is carried out with cost at the
forefront of the mind, rather than control,
visibility, or even ethics. Using the cheaper
locations of the world to manufacture goods
at high volumes is a cost-effective way for
many manufactures to run their business
and, with no incentive to do otherwise,
rearranging a supply chain to ‘reshore’
manufacturing is likely much too complex
and much too time-consuming to do.
Yet, many consider there to be hidden
costs involved with this model that only
rear their ugly heads in times of crisis.
Richardson gives the generic example of a
part that is integral to one’s manufacturing
line, or integral to the function of their
customer’s assembled product, something
that, “if you don’t get that part, it’s going
to cost you more than anything. Is it worth
having it manufactured thousands of miles
away where you have
no visibility of it just
because it costs you ten
cents?”
The same idea crossed
Xometry CEO Randy
Altschuler’s mind in April 2020.
Talking to TCT, he stressed: “We need to
start quantifying the cost of supply chain
disruptions and of risk. It may look like
something from a location overseas might
be 50% less expensive than domestic, but if
you factor in some percentage chance that
there could be a supply chain Black Swan
event like we’ve had now where there’s no
supply available, that’s worth something
and that needs to be put into the equation.”
Those considerations are certainly
more likely to be made off the back of the
pandemic and the disruptions that came
with it. But as Dr Jennifer Johns writes on
page 14, the reshoring of manufacturing is
a political discussion. Indeed, Altschuler
conceded that the concept needs
the backing from governments, with
subsidies being offered, as they have
been in countries like Japan, to ‘bring
manufacturing home.’ Without
them, manufacturers are likely
to put cost efficiency first. This
point was highlighted by 3D Hubs
CEO Bram de Zwart who, in writing for
Business Insider last year, said: “From
our experience, the balance between cost
and the quality of manufacturers is often much
more favourable when sourcing overseas,
which is a very harsh reality but something we
can’t ignore, especially during a period when
most businesses are particularly stretched
on resources.” He went on to suggest that a
combination of both onshore and offshore
production is an effective way of enabling
supply chain flexibility, citing the fact that when
Asian factories opened up again last year,
many of those in Europe and North America
were shutting down.
There is much to ponder for manufacturers
making these decisions, particularly at a time
when supply chain disruptions and cash
flow problems are impacting the business
in an intertwined way. Again on page 14,
Dr Johns notes that she generally doesn’t
expect manufacturers to shift production
from one location to another in a ‘like for like’
way because of the complexities involved,

but instead there may be changes to the
‘status quo’ and that could be good news
for additive. Especially given some of the
potential wins that are available.
"THE SKY'S THE LIMIT"
The fundamental thing that a supply
chain must do, Pastor emphasised last
year, is match demand with supply. And
the best way of doing that, he reckons,
is on-demand manufacturing with limited
physical inventory. Scott Sevcik, Stratasys’
VP of Aerospace, agreed in July 2020,
pushing forward the idea of ‘one on the
shelf’, allowing there for less wait time upon
ordering the part, and less scrap should the
demand for it never come. Both suggest
3D printing has an obvious play here, while
Pastor said HP is working with customers
who are already starting to implement the
strategy.
In responding to a statistic that
came out of HP’s aforementioned
survey – that 75% of respondents
suggested 3D printing may be
useful as a back-up technology to
traditional means of manufacture
– Essentium CEO Blake Teipel
analogised 3D printing with a fleet
of water pumps that operate in New
Orleans, a city just below sea level that
gets hit every year by hurricanes. In normal
times, those pumps might be at 20-30%
capacity to keep the ocean back, while the
rest sit idle. Yet, when a hurricane arrives,
they all spring into action to quickly reduce
the flooding.
“AM is just like those pumps,” Teipel said.
“You’re able to produce parts and then
you’re also able to have that surge capacity
when you need it.”
Essentium also thinks there’s scope to, as
they did with the face masks earlier in the
pandemic, use 3D printing to supplement
traditional manufacturing. Similarly, from
J&J’s experiences, the company is backing
the sheer ability it displayed to turn on a
dime last year and produce something it
wasn’t expecting to a few days earlier.
“As a global company operating in
markets all over the world, there is no
such thing as a ‘one size fits all approach’,”
said Sam Onukuri, Head of 3D Printing &
Customer Solutions at J&J. “We operate in
a dynamic marketplace where consumer
preferences are constantly shifting and
demands are only increasing, meaning we
must be able to quickly pivot to meet the
needs of customers in specific markets.
[This] can only be provided through a
sustainable, flexible supply chain aligned
end-to-end with our commercial R&D
teams.”
Richardson too, in referencing Forecast
3D’s additive manufacture of testing
swabs, eulogised about the demonstration
of “collaborative planning, collaborative
design, focusing on your strengths, trusting
“We anticipate
that 3D
printing is a
mainstay
of supply
chains.”
SUPPLY CHAIN
your partners and then trying to get that real
time data from the market of where shortfall
was.”
There’s an array of opportunities for 3D
printing, some being proved out during the
pandemic, while others are currently more
speculative. But those that are proffered
generally revolve around the technology’s
capacity to produce end-use parts, particularly
as its capabilities continue to grow. Often
overlooked when discussing 3D printing’s
potential within flexible supply chains is its
rapid prototyping proficiencies. This is where,
Richardson suggested, the technology will have
its biggest and quickest impact. Graves agreed,
asserting we could be about to see
“an explosion in the designing of
components made by additive
manufacturing.”
Yet, Richardson maintained
that ‘every production opportunity
starts with a prototyping opportunity.’
Indeed, he and Forecast 3D saw as
much just under 12 months ago. The
naval swabs project started out as a way
of validating design; it became a bona
fide AM production application scaling into
the millions. Key, as ever, to opening up such
opportunities with AM remains finding the right
business cases, whether it be down to volumes
required or complexity. Not every agile and
resilient manufacturing supply chain will rely on
3D printed parts, but in a period when all will
be carrying out in-depth assessments of their
supply networks, there’s a belief across the
board that additive has a big role to play.
“Supply chains take a long time to re-
engineer,” Teipel evaluated. “It’s going to take
another 1, 2, 3, 4 years to see the evolution of
supply chains to the point where there’s a new
type of optimisation because the supply chains
have been optimised for the manufacturing
technologies of the 80s, 90s and early 2000s.
But now, because of additive manufacturing and
the buzzy bits of smart factories and the rest,
you’re starting to see a new type of efficiency
emerge.”
“We anticipate that 3D printing is a mainstay
of supply chains,” Onukuri added. “We always
want to ensure that we can meet the needs
of customers in different markets while also
pivoting quickly. By re-imagining the way that
we create and deliver products and services,
we truly move one step closer to innovation that
can change health for humanity.”
“Additive manufacturing with trust and
collaboration can take you to the next level,”
Richardson finished. “Case in point is the nasal
swabs. We did it in a short period of time,
accelerated under the gun and were very
reactive. Now, think if you were proactive, and
had a big supply chain goal or vision in your
head, and then you take the time to implement
an agile supply chain with time, I mean, the sky’s
the limit.”
29.1 / www.tctmagazine.com / 013
 WORDS: Dr Jennifer Johns, Reader in International Business, School of
SUPPLY CHAIN
Management, University of Bristol & Academic Advisor to GTMA and Reshoring UK
COMPLEXITY:
AM IN THE POST-
COVID-19 ERA
G
lobalisation
has created an
interconnected
global economy.
Underpinning this are supply
chains, facilitating the movement
of goods in increasingly complex
ways. Until relatively recently, the
vital importance of supply chains
has tended to be overlooked,
certainly in relation to the general
public’s understanding of how
supply chains support economic
activities. Now the combined
impacts of COVID-19 and BREXIT
are forcing a closer examination
of supply chains as they
change, are disrupted or even
permanently ruptured.
The contemporary
complexity of supply chains
is well understood within
the manufacturing sector.
Over decades, advances in
communication and transportation
technologies have allowed
supply chains to become more
geographically extensive, and
firms have been able to use
a wide array of sophisticated
logistics, tracking and monitoring
technologies to manage their
supply chains. Combined with
014 / www.tctmagazine.com / 29.1
changing combinations of in-house
production, inter-firm trading and
outsourcing (within or beyond national
boundaries), supply chains have
become highly sophisticated to meet
the demands of manufacturers and their
customers.
However, there are many
pressures on industry that
threaten to reshape supply
chains in numerous ways,
typically encouraging a
reduction in complexity. For
the last three decades, where
attention has been focused
on supply chains it has done
so as part of the sustainability
agenda. This agenda covers
environmental (i.e. food
miles, peak oil) and supply
chain ethics (i.e. human rights abuses)
concerns. Environmental concerns
pressure supply chains to shorten as
demand for more locally produced
goods (particularly food) increases and
producers seek to reduce their carbon
footprint. Ethical concerns, typically
concentrated on the working conditions
in factories (including subcontractors),
has increased requirements on firms
to monitor and inspect suppliers and
be aware of lower tier suppliers. This
has been driven by companies’ own
corporate social responsibility strategies
and more recently as a consequence
of the Modern Slavery Act. One could
logically expect to see a reduction in
supplier numbers to facilitate closer
monitoring and inspection, but this has
not emerged as an observable trend.
Despite substantial pressure, we have
not seen either a reduction of the length
of supply chains or in supplier numbers.
Indeed, complexity continues to increase
as the economic (profit-maximisation)
imperatives driving sourcing decisions
prevail. Until recently that is. The impact
of COVID-19 and, to a lesser
degree, political changes
(Trump’s US trade policies
and BREXIT) are having
more long-lasting and
transformational impacts
on supply chains. Since
March 2020, they have been
battered by external forces,
resulting in disruption and,
in some cases, permanent
rupture. The impacts are
multiple and include the temporary closure of
factories in China, national lockdowns, workforce
vulnerabilities and shortages, and the costs and
logistics of complying with COVID-19 guidance.
We can see three broad trends in the
reconfiguration of supply chains that seek to
address the vulnerabilities of geographically
extensive supply chains (particularly those
between advanced economies and the Far
East). First, that of reshoring, the process of
manufacturing returning ‘home’ to advanced
economies from lost cost locations. Interest
in reshoring is partly politically motivated (the
futile aim of national self-sufficiency) and partly
driven by industry concerns around quality
and supply chain risk. Beyond a handful of
well-publicised multinational firms relocating
some manufacturing, data on reshoring levels
shows it to be relatively small in scale but
increasing – and likely accelerating since March
2020. Reshoring presents an opportunity for
additive manufacturing (AM) as the relocation
of production affords companies the chance
to rethink their production methods. Evidence
currently suggests that little reshoring is on a
like-for-like basis and if firms relocate production
to their home (advanced) economy it is likely they

will be adopting
more advanced
production methods.
Here, the ability
of AM to produce
complex parts (that
combine a number of
previously separately
manufactured
components) will reduce
supplier numbers and facilitate the
relocation of production.
Second, the relocalisation of
production, often bringing production
much closer to the consumer.
This satisfies many sustainability
demands, reduces supply chain disruption
and increases speed to customer. Distributed
manufacturing is often assumed to include
“Relocation of advanced manufacturing methods, across the
production affords
whole spectrum of desktop to industrial AM
machines and post-production technologies.
companies the Here, the unique capabilities of AM mean the
technologies are able to offer much more
chance to rethink highly localised solutions than traditional
manufacturing methods.
their production The current COVID-19 crisis is having
methods.” an immediate effect on the organisation
of supply chains with the adoption of a
compromise solution, that of dual sourcing.
SUPPLY CHAIN
In times of supply uncertainty this
strategy supplements existing (often
geographically extensive) supply
chains with more localised supply
options. Often the local suppliers are
the backup option in the event of
established supply chain failure. This
dual sourcing strategy thus increases
supply chain complexity rather than
reducing it, adding to the resourcing
and management of supply. Again,
this opens up potential spaces for AM
to exploit, particularly with regard to
removing the need for time consuming
and costly re-tooling. The flexibility
of AM may prove to be attractive to
companies needing additional supply,
which begins dialogue with firms that
may not (yet) be convinced of the
advantages of AM, potentially leading
to the local AM firm outcompeting the
low-cost supplier.
At present the situation regarding the
reconfiguration of supply chains is an
uncertain one, especially as we enter
the post-BREXIT period. A number
of different processes are operating
that will impact on where and how we
manufacture, but not all are moving
in the same direction (technologically
or geographically). We can expect
a general trend towards a degree
of relocalisation of production and
reshoring, but this will be sectorally and
geographically uneven.
As history has shown us, supply
chains are increasingly complex, but
the weight of the impacts of COVID-19
and BREXIT may force a change. It is
a challenging time, but there are some
clear opportunities for AM to begin to
really demonstrate and showcase the
capabilities of the technology, helping
to deliver meaningful progress in the
reorganisation of manufacturing in the
post-COVID-19 era.
Watch: AM’s Role in Supply Chain
Resilience | TCT Conference @
Formnext mytct.co/JJohns
29.1 / www.tctmagazine.com / 015
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WORDS: SAM DAVIES
I
n Mumbai, India, a world record
certifying authority representative sits
and counts up to 7,801. Imaginarium
and the Diamond Store by Chandubhai
have gone for the world record of most
diamonds set in a ring and wait patiently
to have it confirmed. Watching the
representative manually count nearly 8,000
diamond pieces across two whole days with
nothing but a jeweller’s loupe, the partners
are thankful they had digital technologies to
hand when embarking on the Divine – 1801
Brahma Vajra Kamalam project.
The piece, which broke the Guinness World
Record in August 2020, only to be usurped
in November, was inspired by the natural
design of the Himalayan Camellia flower.
It features seven parts – a gold shank and
six rows of petals – all assembled around a
stigma crew to allow thousands of diamonds
to be set by one of Imaginarium’s skilled
jewellers within prongs on each component
with the highly precise micro pavé technique.
But such were the intricacies of the
design, the partners decided to leverage
Imaginarium’s 3D printing capacity to iterate
multiple versions of the ring before heading
into production.
“The precision and tolerances are
impossible in the conventional way of making
jewellery,” Tanmay Shah, Head of Innovations
at Imaginarium, tells TCT. “The convention
that I refer to is where all of this would have
been the work of a craftsmen who starts with
SHOWN:
SKILLED JEWELLER SETTING
DIAMONDS ON THE DIVINE – 1801
BRAHMA VAJRA KAMALAM RING
“The precision
and tolerances
are impossible in
the conventional
way of making
jewellery.”
a block of [material], and they have
only two-dimensional sketches to
refer to, so even the curvature [of the
petals] in three dimensions, the way it
fills that volume, was something that
had to be in their head. Only a select
few skilled artisans could have pulled
this off.”
Imaginarium was well-placed to take
on this project. At its headquarters in
Mumbai, it has dozens of employees
working on jewellery manufacturing
and finishing every day while it
was able to leverage Digital Light
Processing technology from Rapid
Shape, who has products designed
specifically for jewellery projects.
Using the vendor’s S30+, Imaginarium
utilised its 405 nm UV LED light
source, HD 1920 x 1080 px resolution
CREATIVE
and resin temperature control capabilities
to produce iterations in a quick-print,
high-resolution general-purpose material
that helped Imaginarium visualise the
design and spot defects. The company
then harnessed Rapid Shape’s direct
casting material to allow the ring to be
cast in gold.
“When it comes to this level of
precision,” Shah explains, “we needed
a laser-based printer because of the
tolerances. Rapid Shape comes closest
to an SLA. The interesting evolution
of technology is that projector-based
system, because of its high resolution
and high definition, is now giving parts
at a par with a high-end laser-based
SLA machine. But the added advantage
for the DLP is speed. Whereas an SLA
machine would have taken six hours to
make this prototype, a DLP would take
one hour to do the same.”
Jewellery is one of Imaginarium’s
four main business activities, with 3D
printing regularly being leant on to help
the company tackle complex designs,
reduce the time to manufacture and print
one-off or customised goods. All were at
play in this record-breaking project. Shah
estimates that this design, approached
in a conventional way, would have taken
months because of the complex shape
and need to assemble multiple pieces.
And that is just the first iteration, without
considering the size of the prongs that
differ for every diamond they hold.
“That’s the standard,” he says. “So,
enter 3D printing. What that does is one,
all of your simulation, validation etc is
done in the CAD software; we could
modify the design as many times as
we wanted, and even after making the
first prototype, if we find something not
working, it’s a matter of one hour or two
hours to tweak the CAD design and start
again. Two, of course, it’s impossible to
achieve otherwise. And the third is when
you can play with multiple materials,
you’re not trying to replicate a prototype
into some other conventional form, it’s
part of the same workflow. It’s just one
workflow.”
29.1 / www.tctmagazine.com / 017
 FINE LINES
LACE founder Jenny Wu on using 3D printing to produce fine jewellery.
I
n the corridors of Art Basel Miami,
visitors are rushing to see a bold
piece they’ve never seen before,
wanting to know more about it,
wanting to touch it, maybe even wanting
to buy it.
Taken aback by the interest, Jenny Wu
returned to her Oyler Wu Collaborative
architecture design studio with the
idea to start a new business. Seven
years on, her LACE jewellery brand has
launched a wedding collection, a men’s
line, and recently expanded into Europe.
Underpinning all that success is 3D
printing technology.
It was the autumn of 2014 when Wu’s first
LACE line of jewellery was launched, just
a year after she first used 3D printing to
make a fashion statement while speaking
publicly and attending events. Among the
first products on sale were the Tangens
necklace, which features interlocking
elements and was initially produced
with Fused Deposition Modelling (FDM)
technology, and the Papilio ring, a
design inspired by the movement of a
butterfly wing that has been additvely
manufactured in nylon and metal
materials, while also cast in sterling silver.
Each of these designs began with a
sketch, before moving into an extensive
prototyping phase that first assessed
form and fit and later considered the best
material for production. The process used
for production, though, has been subject
to much deliberation over the years, for
not every step of Wu’s journey with LACE
has been a walk in the park. “For the
first few years, there was definitely a lot
of learning,” she tells TCT. Case in point
is the Tangens necklace, one of LACE’s
flagship products and the kind of piece
that was drawing the attention of so
many in Miami. While the design remains
much the same as it did back in 2014, the
production method needed changing.
“Back then, it was mostly FDM and to
print a lot of my jewellery was challenging,
there was a lot of limitations for the kind
of work I wanted to do and how it might
translate to 3D printing,” Wu says. “With
the support systems, FDM was impossible,
018 / www.tctmagazine.com / 29.1
WORDS: SAM DAVIES
so now I mostly work with SLS [Selective 4RIGHT:
Laser Sintering], which, being powder- LACE'S ALLEGRO CUFF RING
based, obviously makes it more feasible to IN 18K PLATED ROSE GOLD
do interlocking pieces, [for example].”
6BELOW:
Finding the right process to produce LACE'S 3D PRINTED TANGENS NECKLACE
this piece was paramount for Wu since
she had insisted on the necklace being
completely 3D printed, including the latch,
with zero assembly. Since the necklace
was a big and bold piece, it needed to be
flexible and durable, but not so hard that it
would hurt upon contact with the skin.
“Figuring out how to print the necklace
was probably one of the most challenging
things,” she recalls. “Just the latch itself,
I probably printed that latch 50 times
because when it’s too tight, the customer
will yank on it and the whole thing will pull
off, and then if it’s too loose, someone
knocks you and it falls off, and so, in the
end, we figured out using SLS with a TPU
was the best method, but even within that,
looking at the tolerance of each intricate
[interlocking] piece and trying to make
sure they move but don’t collide, that was
a lot of work.”
A lot of effort, as well, has gone into
“I was
finding the right material to use for pieces,
especially as the additive manufacturing
industry has made great strides in
expanding users’ options in that regard
over the years. Some materials have been always
interested
too soft and easily breakable, others too
stiff for the specific application.
in elevating
It has led Wu to look beyond polymers
and closer at what metal 3D printing
can offer, resulting in many new designs
3D printed
that polymer AM couldn’t address, such
as the Mobius ring, while offering metal
versions of several existing designs that
had previously been released as plastic
pieces, like the Papilio ring. Per Wu, jewellery
into fine
most of what LACE now offers is done
in precious metals and steels, largely for
reasons around durability and wearability
jewellery.”
– considering how a customer might bang
their ring on a table or not feel when their
earrings have fallen out because they’re
too lightweight – but also because, “I was
always interested in elevating 3D printed
jewellery into a fine jewellery brand and
not a fashion jewellery brand.”

VELUM AND VALUES
The latest LACE piece is the limited-edition
Velum ring, released in 2020 with only 35
units going into production. It came after many
months of design and prototyping using a resin
3D printer, making adjustments ‘slowly and
constantly’ before eventually printing a final
iteration in precious metal. Velum, as with all
LACE products, is produced on-demand and
is available in stainless steel, bronze and grey
steel, which are 3D printed, or cast in silver
after the piece has been printed in wax.
Velum is said to have taken LACE into a
new direction with regards design and the
inspiration behind this piece tells you it could
barely be possible without 3D printing.
“Sometimes I think about the work we do
in architecture leading the way, inspiring the
work in the jewellery, but Velum is one that
is happening at the same time as what we’re
doing in architecture,” Wu explains. “We’ve
been really inspired by taking a soft, draped
surface, but then producing it in a hard
material; trying to get the undulations and
the reading of fabric, but hard. We’ve been
interested in that type of design for some time.
We won a competition for this drapery inspired
SHOWN:
LACE'S LIMITED EDITION VELUM RING
CREATIVE
canopy for a museum, and at the same
time, I was working on this Velum piece.
It’s nice to have things that are working
at different scales and, obviously, with
the soft surface and curves, 3D printing
is just completely suited for that type of
application.”
Though Wu has been working as a
jewellery designer for seven years now,
she has never seen it as a departure
from architecture. Rather, she considers
it architecture at a smaller scale that
is placed on the body. While the Oyler
Wu Collaborative endeavour sees the
implementation of additive to produce
scale models, LACE has enabled her
to explore the full potential of the
technology with greater freedom. It has
also allowed her to do so in a manner that
matches her values, that considers the
wants of her customer base at an intimate
level and allows her to bring to market
something unique in style and design.
Each LACE piece begins on a sketch
pad, is modelled digitally and printed
repeatedly until the design is finalised,
before production is outsourced. A
workflow typical of many a jeweller. But it
is done Jenny Wu’s way.
“For me, 3D printing has completely
changed the way a business model is
run, especially in fashion and jewellery,”
Wu finishes. “There was a point when
you consider, ‘should I just have this
[mass] produced somewhere and instead
of printing it in small batches,’ and in six
years of building this company, I found
that I was able to evolve my design over
time, I was able to hold small inventory,
and I’m able to print to order and be
nimble about when I can launch a piece.
“When I talk to more traditional
brands, just making a mould for a piece
of jewellery costs a lot of money and
then the time between conception and
production could run between one
to two years. You’re making a huge
investment and you’re expected to order
100,000 pieces otherwise you can’t
recover the cost of R&D. You just think
about all that fast fashion out there, and
the fact we have sweatshops and they’re
just pumping out massive amounts of
[products] that people may or may not
want, and then you have this huge sell
out at the end, it just feels like this is
not the right business model to work in
this time and age. Obviously, our cost
per piece will be higher than if it was
mass-produced, but I feel like this is the
more sustainable and ethical way of
practicing.”
29.1 / www.tctmagazine.com / 019
 AECTUALLY,
IT’S 3D PRINTED
I
f you’ve walked through the
terminal building at Amsterdam’s
Schiphol Airport, you perhaps
won’t have noticed that the floor
you rolled your suitcase across was, in
fact, 3D printed. It’s one of the many
high-profile projects realised by Aectual,
a provider of large, bespoke 3D printed
architectural and interior products
that demonstrate the true potential for
additive manufacturing (AM) in the built
world.
Inspired by classic terrazzo flooring,
the end result was a combination of 3D
printed patterns fused with a bio-based
terrazzo infill, built using a sustainable
AM workflow which Aectual opened up
to AEC professionals and consumers
in a new online beta platform back in
January.
It’s an idea that grew out of the
3D Printed Canal House project in
Amsterdam, a renowned R&D venture
conceived by Dutch DUS Architects
to build a full-size canal house using
a large-scale, portable AM system
known as the KamerMaker. Today,
through Aectual, that same team is
now deploying that very technology
to produce mass customised products
such as wall panels, flooring, room
dividers and stairs with 100% recyclable,
renewable materials.
“We actually got a lot of questions
over the years from architects [and]
colleagues that would also love to
do something with the technology,”
Hedwig Heinsman, Co-founder and
Chief Commercial Officer, Aectual told
TCT. “We realised we really would love
to build a platform where anyone can
just go online and customise their own
interior and architectural products and
ultimately, even buildings. So, at that
moment, we decided to just take the
plunge.”
Through this new platform, consumers
can tailor the size, colours and patterns
across a line of 12 signature parametric
pieces, while those in the AEC industry
are being invited to collaborate and
020 / www.tctmagazine.com / 29.1
WORDS: LAURA GRIFFITHS
develop their own products. To date,
this design-to-delivery platform has
been deployed in over 50 projects for
established customers like Nike and
BMW Group.
The Aectual solution comprises of a
proprietary extrusion-based 3D printing
technology, robotics from ABB and
recyclable materials, including specially
developed plant-based polymer pellets
engineered with Henkel. But perhaps
the biggest takeaway from Aectual’s
platform is how its foundation is
firmly rooted in the circular economy.
Back in 2019, while outlining its ‘The
Future of Making’ ambitions for design
automation, software provider Autodesk
shared findings that 30% of global
waste comes from the construction
industry. Aectual’s strategy seeks
to address this crucial challenge. In
addition to leveraging the outward
benefits of additive versus subtractive
manufacturing – less waste, less
material usage – Aectual says its
process promises less CO2 emissions
compared to traditional methods of
manufacture for custom architectural
products and promotes a full end-to-
end sustainable customer journey,
which encourages buyers to return their
Aectual pieces once they’re no longer
needed so that they can be shredded
and repurposed into new products.
Of Aectual’s ethos, Heinsman said:
“We had several pillars. One was really
the idea of community or democratising
architecture so that you can really give
people access to the act of shaping their
environments - ultimately, entire homes
and communities but we start small
with these products. And of course, the
whole aspect of creating without any
waste and working with recycled and
more natural materials has also been
really a core element from the start.”
As the Schiphol Airport project shows,
Aectual’s work blends 3D printing with
traditional construction mediums like
glass and concrete but the start-up
has been mindful to ensure that this
sustainability focus remains true even in
those more classic materials. Heinsman
shares how, in this case, they were
able to use waste marble material and
replace the traditional binding agent
with a plant based alternative while,
in another project, they managed to
recycle used Budweiser bottles into a
unique flooring concept at the Capital C
offices in Amsterdam.
“The whole
production
process
will only
become more
and more
sustainable.”
While products are manufactured
in-house at Aectual’s Amsterdam
production facility, which currently
houses four robot arms with a huge
print area of 500 sq. ft., Heinsman adds
that in future, there’s scope to leverage
additive’s other highly touted green
attribute – localised production.
“That’s of course really how we
envision it in the future - there will
be just a lot of local hubs and we
can connect to all kinds of digital
manufacturing techniques,” Heinsman
said. “At the moment, I think it’s already
a better alternative because we can
really produce very strategically so it's
all made to measure - we can really
dimension things according to how it's
transported so that it can be flat packed
in a smart way. So, the whole production
process will only become more and
more sustainable in the coming years.”

6BELOW:
AECTUAL’S KAMERMAKER PRINTER
Having ran DUS Architects for
15 years and worked closely with
large-scale 3D printing – the
KamerMaker printer itself is now
on its third iteration – Heinsman
feels there’s been a shift in the
way AM is being used by AEC
professionals. Like the bespoke
Aectual panel on the wall of Nike’s
flagship store on London’s Oxford
Street that went from concept
to installation in just six weeks,
there’s a lot of value to be found
in 3D printing individual features
rather than focusing purely on,
oftentimes headline making, entire
buildings.
“Any building that you see now
is always built up from lots of
different elements, windowpanes,
doors, bricks, you name it,”
Heinsman explained. “What is
also interesting there is that
[AEC] is a very capital-intensive
industry, there's a lot of expensive
machinery involved and you're
dealing with a lot of building
regulations. It makes it a bit easier
when you focus on one product
at a time, to really deep dive into
products, get all of the building
regulations and specs sorted, fire
3LEFT:
FLOOR AT AMSTERDAM’S
SCHIPHOL AIRPORT
CREATIVE
restrictions, UV resistance, etc.
So, in that sense, it's quite easy
to make a prototype but in order
to really launch something onto
the market, that's really a different
thing and I think that's really what
we've mastered or managed to do
now with several products.”
This is just the beginning and
Heinsman assures that those
ambitions to fully 3D print buildings
are very much in Aectual plans as
it proved last year with the “tiny
Bauhaus”, a small visitor building
designed to celebrate the Bauhaus
movement.
“It is definitely something that
we can already do,” Heinsman
added. “But what we also love
is that we offer a lot of solutions
for conventional buildings,
renovations, new builds. Overtime,
my ultimate fantasy is that people
can go online and just start to pick
and play with all kinds of products
and start to create their own dream
office or dream home or dream
day-care centre. We're actually not
so far away from that.”
6BELOW:
3D PRINTED PANEL AT
NIKE FLAGSHIP STORE
29.1 / www.tctmagazine.com / 021
SIMULATION
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ENABLING
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I
t can be deflating, stressful and
exhausting. To exert so much
effort, brain power and creativity
over a sustained period of time,
only to realise there’s still much room for
improvement. Or you can take it in your
stride, collaborate with the right partner
and open the door to new opportunities.
For decades now, design engineers have
leant on 3D printing’s ability to rapidly print
parts to assess the form and fit, maybe
the function too, of an application that
will soon go into production. But they’ll
probably do so in a different material,
colour and surface finish.
Companies don’t want to spend too
much money on expensive materials,
only for the design to be iterated a dozen
times, especially when tools to simulate
performance and behaviour are now so
readily available. It means colour, materials
and finish (CMF) simulation, in which
designers get a true insight into how their
part looks, feels, and performs, is often
carried out only towards the end of the
product development phase.
“The problem is they don’t trust
the digital design and some of
them are using animation tools,
rendering tools, CAD tools and
so on, so the workflow isn’t
smooth,” Michal Diga, Director
of PolyJet Software Solutions at
Stratasys, begins. “We wanted
to enable our customers to have
a smooth workflow, to capture the
design intent and hold the physical
model in their hands.”
Diga is explaining the motives behind
Stratasys’ partnership with software
company Luxion, which has resulted in
the former’s multi-material, multi-colour J
Series of PolyJet 3D printers and GrabCAD
Print software being made compatible with
the latter’s KeyShot 10 rendering platform.
It is recognition from Stratasys, one of
the oldest companies in the 3D printing

SHOWN:
BLUETOOTH SPEAKER MODEL FEATURING
ADVANCED SIMULATED TEXTURES SUCH AS
WOOD. PRODUCED BY PRIORITY DESIGNS ON THE
STRATASYS J55 3D PRINTER USING KEYSHOT 10
space, that even after 30 years, there is
still room for the technology’s prototyping
capabilities to grow. In particular, the
company sees CMF simulation as a key
part of the design phase that is currently
too costly, time-consuming and complex.
“The screen is good enough for
some things,” offers Lior Elgali, Product
Manager, Design at Stratasys, “but you
don’t touch it, and this means you don’t
really know how it’s going to behave in
the real world. Even if you think you do,
you don’t. It’s like seeing a scenery on
National Geographic and being there, it’s
a completely different experience.”
Independently, the KeyShot 10 software
boasts extensive material, texture and
colour libraries. Users can access metal,
plastic and wood materials; Pantone
and RAL colours; and bump, colour,
displacement and roughness textures,
rendering models to encompass all this
detail on screen. With the J Series and
its own proficiencies in colour,
materials and surface
finishes, as well as its
compatibility with the
3MF file format, they
can also fabricate
the design in 3D
form.
SOFTWARE
SPONSORED BY
WORDS: SAM DAVIES
“3MF was actually the enabler,” Diga
explains, “because the special thing about it is
that it doesn’t just hold the geometry, but also
the colour, the materials and finish. You have
much more information in one package.”
Being able to transfer the capabilities of
KeyShot 10 through to the J Series and hold
so much data, Diga and Elgali believe, is set
to have a massive impact on the speed and
quality of product design for J Series users.
In the past, they’ve seen designers use
CAD platforms with limited CMF tools, using
textures and colours as placeholders – even
labelling parts ‘green’ rather than designing
in the shade they desire – because of the
lack of available options. It means that often,
the fully formed and fully detailed design
isn’t prototyped until the very end. But the
combination of KeyShot 10 and the J Series,
Diga believes, can change that.
“It accelerates the design process so they
can start early with CMF,” she says. “They get
[the prototype overnight], the quality is better
because they don’t have to imagine too much,
you can hold it and touch it, and you can give
it to the decision makers so that early in the
process you have the right direction.”
Having enriched the capacity of 3D printing
as a prototyping tool with their partnership,
Luxion and Stratasys promise there is more
to come. They want to add an option to print
directly from KeyShot 10 to their nearby
service provider, control and specify shore
value within the 3MF file, carry out research
into how to translate transparencies from the
computer to the real world, and support bump
maps to enhance surface finishes.
“It has been a pleasure working with
Luxion in the past year, and we’re so
happy we have the opportunity
to continue working together in
2021,” Diga finishes.
29.1 / www.tctmagazine.com / 023
 FINDING A '
T
here are many places in which set about developing tools that not only
you could pick up the story of aim to change how parts are designed,
Hyperganic CEO Lin Kayser. but in doing so, take full advantage of 3D
There’s the child inspired by
technology, the entrepreneurial teenager,
“We have a printing’s capabilities.

the successful businessperson rubbing

shoulders with Hollywood actors and
now the spearhead of a team that talks
seriously of a ‘paradigm shift’ in design.
lot of global From the outset, Kayser and the
company’s CTO Michael Gallo believed
challenges to they would not be able to enable the
paradigm shift they think is necessary

That kind of chat followed Kayser’s solve and we’re with traditional CAD software that ‘work
very nicely for simple shapes, but terribly

running out
purchase of a 3D printer in 2012. For for complex things.’ In one conversation,
someone who thinks of software as an Gallo is said to have suggested creating

of time.”
‘amazing technology that can create a model where ‘we basically store
anything,’ having a 3D printer fabricate every atom, every molecule in an
some of those things physically saw object and then we can design
Kayser hooked immediately. While at that anything the printer can
time many in the industry were positing print.’ “Of course,” Kayser
the idea that a 3D printer would be in
every home, one of the technology’s
hobbyist users was captivated by its
potential to ‘transform’ the way we
manufacture. Not long after, he handed
his notice in at his then-employer Adobe,
set up a new start-up in his hometown of
Munich and is still motivated by that very
thought nearly ten years on.

“The key thing for us is to dramatically

accelerate innovation,” Kayser begins. “We
believe that innovation of physical objects
has not been progressing very fast. And
we believe that we have a lot of challenges
as humanity that we need to solve through
physical objects. Think about last year, we
shut the entire world down, essentially,
and it had how much impact on carbon
emission? It had one, but we didn’t have
enough impact to make a dent in climate
change, for example. The technical
solutions that we have need to change in
order to address [these issues].”

FUNDAMENTAL FRUSTRATIONS
Hyperganic’s contribution to that is
the Core 2.0 and Print Framework 2.0
software it is launching formally in the
coming months, after years’ operating
in stealth and even more time carrying
out R&D. As Kayser saw 3D printing’s
potential to alter the way things are made,
he also observed that ‘maybe we should
also change the way we design things
and engineer things.’ He believes that 3D SHOWN:
ROCKET ENGINE
printers are not so much limited by their
APPLICATION
technology as they are by the designs that DEVELOPED WITH
are fed into them. And so, Hyperganic has HYPERGANIC’S PLATFORM

024 / www.tctmagazine.com / 29.1


'RITHM
WORDS: SAM DAVIES
recalls, “we had a good laugh and said, ‘this
is ridiculous.’ But then a couple of days later,
Michael calls me and says, ‘hey Lin, why don’t
we try this?’”
Building the high voxel engine that would
enable Hyperganic to do this took three to four
years. But now, Kayser and co are confident
their platform can ‘represent any object that
a 3D printer can theoretically output.’ That
opens them up to objects of such extremely
high complexity that the development of the
parts, Kayser says, need to be automated.
“This is where we end up in AI-based
engineering, where you can use genetic
algorithms and use neural nets to find out
interesting patterns and structures that work
well,” Kayser explains. “And why is that so
interesting to me? That has its roots in a
fundamental frustration. Take a modern car
and strip away all the plastic decoration that
they put on, it doesn’t look that different
from a car from the 1980s or 1990s. And
you ask yourself, why has innovation
not happened faster? Because
we need it urgently, we
have a lot of global
challenges that we need to solve and we’re
kind of running out of time. And the problem
is that the paradigms that we use to engineer
objects are derived from the way the Greeks
and the Romans designed objects. The smart
guy or smart girl sitting in front of a computer
and drawing stuff on the screen and it always
depends on the intelligence and experience
of the designer and engineer to know what
comes out of it.”
Hyperganic’s idea is to develop algorithms
within its Core 2.0 offering, input a description
of the part and allow the artificial intelligence
to take care of the design of that component. It
leans on some of the principles of generative
design tools, building optimised designs from
scratch and then allowing the user to harness
the intelligence generated for other products.
Hyperganic refers to this as ‘defining a way
to design’, rather than simply designing with
sketches and CAD drawings. This idea has
been adopted in the computer hardware
space where initially microchips had been
sketched, and then later designed in a CAD
programme, but once they got so complex,
they had to change the approach.
“Instead of doing computer-aided design,
you have to do computer-generated design,”
Kayser explains. “If today you design a
microchip, you’re not doing it geometrically,
you’re doing it algorithmically. You’re
describing what the algorithm should do
and the algorithm comes up with the
geometry. That’s what we want to do
for the rest of the world.”
EARLY APPLICATIONS
Since Hyperganic first engineered
its software a few years back – before
Kayser had even incorporated the
company in 2017 – the company has been
working with customers to develop concept
applications by combining its Core offering
with 3D printing technology via Print
Framework’s mesh repair, slicing, support
generation and stacking tools. One of
those applications is a customised bicycle
helmet that was derived from the scan
data of a triathlete’s head and statistical
crash data procured from research into
how cyclists fall when they come off their
bike. This information was factored into the
Hyperganic algorithm and output thousands
of design possibilities, with the selected one
looking like a slimline cap, with room for
SOFTWARE
SPONSORED BY
ventilation at the top of the helmet and
a less porous structure around the sides
to protect the user’s fall.
“This is the power of mass
customisation,” Kayser told the All
Digital Additive Manufacturing YouTube
channel in January. “First, it fits the right
person, and second, you can take new
information into account and in the next
production run, immediately there is a
better product. This can only happen
if you have algorithms creating these
things because no human ever has the
time to adapt everything all of the time.”
Another application the company
has been working on is a heat sink
additively manufactured in copper
that looks more like the bristles of a
brush or a coral in the ocean than a
typical heat sink. Its surface area has
been maximised to allow it to dissipate
as much heat as possible, while the
funnelling of air to the bottom of the
component has also been optimised.
This is considered to be an incredibly
complex design to tackle, per Kayser,
but because it was developed with an
algorithm, it’s not a complexity that
Hyperganic needs to address again and
again.
“When you implement it once, you can
reuse it everywhere and sometimes it’s
really surprising where you end up,” he
says. “For example, the heat exchanger,
because of the algorithm it uses, it
generates structures that are very
stable, so you can stand on it. We’ve
now been using that in completely
different applications where you need
something that distributes the weight
evenly. It’s so interesting because we
actually just wanted to radiate a lot of
heat and be aerodynamically optimised
so that the air flows and takes the heat
out.”
Read the second part of this interview,
where Kayser goes on to discuss some
of the company’s biggest challenges
in bringing its products to market, at:
mytct.co/HyperganicInterview.
29.1 / www.tctmagazine.com / 025
 BIND-AND-SOF
A
s ExOne boldly declares on the cover of this
issue, 2021 is shaping up to be the year of
binder jet additive manufacturing (AM). With
a stream of new machines from the likes of
GE Additive, Desktop Metal and HP making their way onto
the market, we spoke to a number of companies within the
space to find out how software is shaping up to address
the complexities of this technology and maximise its
production capabilities.

For the binder jet pioneer, software plays a key role

at ExOne before, during and after printing. Factoring in
part shrinkage to binder quantity and drying times, the
company has developed tools both in-house and with
external partners like Siemens, Ansys and Altair to tackle
design, live in-process monitoring, control and analysis.
To mitigate the effects of sintering, a necessary post-
processing step that has been successfully deployed in
the metal injection moulding (MIM) industry for decades
but the effects of which remain hard to predict, ExOne tells
TCT it has created “complete software-controlled recipes”
and anticipates a wave of commercial software solutions to
arrive as binder jet demand increases.

Rick Lucas, ExOne Chief Technology Officer and VP,

New Markets, continued: “That will certainly help simplify
the process and increase adoption going forward, but it’s
truly an exciting time in binder jetting and that’s helping
pull a variety of software players into the market to help
support this key sustainable manufacturing technology.”
Lucas may well be on to something. Simulation specialist
Simufact recently introduced a metal binder jet tool which
allows prediction and prevention of the distortion caused
during sintering. The tool, found in Simufact Additive,
addresses this key challenge in the binder jet process
which can sometimes see parts shrink by up to a third in
size. Now, Simufact says users without specialist simulation
knowledge can manage sintering effects such as thermal
strain, friction, gravity, and sintering-induced mechanical
stress, and compensate for those factors at the design
level.
“We see process simulation as a fundamental enabling
technology that will help drive the industrialisation of
metal binder jet AM,” Jeff Robertson, Technical Business
Development, Simufact, part of Hexagon’s Manufacturing
Intelligence division told TCT. “It stands to reason that
without a robust sintering simulation capability, it will be
difficult for companies to take full advantage of MBJ as the
scalable production technology we need it to become.”
5ABOVE:
NEGATIVE OFFSET IN LIVE SINTER AND FINAL MBJ PART
“It’s clear that MBJ has the potential to bring the benefits
of AM to new automotive and industrial applications by
sufficiently lowering cost and processing time compared to
L-PBF, and there is a race to get it right,” Robertson added.
“There are only a few printer OEMs that can achieve this
initial breakthrough and software that helps make sense of
the data and guides the user through the necessary steps
to achieve repeatable quality is a vital component.”
But several OEMs are also building tools internally.
Desktop Metal, known for its bound deposition technology,
recently launched its Live Sinter platform in a bid to
remove the trial-and-error process of sintering and
improve part shape and dimensional tolerances. To
do that, the software uses proprietary algorithms
to generate negative offset geometries by filling
the part design with “cells” which go through the
process of shrinking and distorting in the same way they
would in a furnace to eliminate the need for supports and
ensure parts come out within 1% of their final geometry. Live
Sinter also improves on the use of setters, typically deployed
to prop parts up inside the furnace, by minimising the
requirements for expert sintering knowledge.

Robertson says the most requested functionality is this
ability to perform geometry compensation and if binder jet
continues to rack up the kinds of customers it's currently
attracting across industry - Cummins, Wabtec and Sandvik
in the case of GE Additive or Volkswagen and U.S. Marine
Corp for HP – the significance of those capabilities will
become all the more prominent.
“If you know exactly what that shrinkage is, then you can
put a part in the furnace and essentially scale it up first so that
when it shrinks, it comes out the right size,” Andy Roberts,
Desktop Metal VP of Software, said. “Unfortunately, it's not
that easy because not only does the part shrink in different
amounts in different directions but it also has friction drag
against the setter and because there's friction with the part as

026 / www.tctmagazine.com / 29.1


FTWARE
WORDS: LAURA GRIFFITHS
it shrinks, the setter doesn't shrink.
So, what will happen is, the part
will drag against the setter and as
it shrinks, it will warp and deform
and sometimes even crack.”
Live Sinter runs on a GPU-
accelerated multi-physics engine
with a set of Nvidia physics tools,
borrowed from the gaming world,
in combination with meshless
finite element analysis (FEA) to
rapidly deal with thousands of
cells within in a part. Roberts
shared how the team is constantly
fine-tuning parameters and
discovering new resolutions for
additional challenges such as how
asymmetrical parts with cut-outs
can open up and deform as they
shrink or how the powder spreader
can cause uneven densities.
“It's almost like a street cleaner
in some sense that it has a counter
rotating brush and it's pushing a
mound of powder ahead of it,”
Roberts explained, pointing to an
example of a printed fuel swirler.
“What we found
is that when
the layer
of powder
goes across
5ABOVE:
THREE PHASES OF AUTOMATED
OPTIMISATION SHOW COMPENSATION
FOR DISTORTION IN SIMUFACT ADDITIVE
a prior layer where there's printed
material, it's almost like hitting a
manhole cover on a street and that
causes that density to spike up on the
leading faces of the parts.
“What Live Sinter does is simulate
the behaviour of the part as it exists
after printing with density being
messed up inside the part and in
sintering where you've got friction
and variable warping […]. So it's really
not just simulating the sintering but
simulating the printer and resulting
furnace effects.”
Aiding Live Sinter, Materialise,
known for its software expertise
having provided the backbone to
many leading AM hardware vendors
through its custom build processors,
recently developed a specific
platform for Desktop Metal. Through
this collaboration, Materialise is
providing additional sintering support
generation and metal binder jetting
enhanced 3D nesting capabilities as
part of its Magics SG+ module.
“Out-of-the box software often
doesn’t meet the unique and specific
requirements of binder jetting
SOFTWARE
SPONSORED BY
“We see process
simulation as a
fundamental
enabling
technology.”
technology,” Stefaan Motte, Vice President and Managing
Director of Materialise Software, told TCT. “In addition,
with its large platform, typically smaller parts and high print
rates, binder jetting typically also requires greater parts and
data management. In combination with a build processor,
which manages the communication between software and
machine, Streamics, our AM management software, can
facilitate this.”
Motte explained how Materialise’s build processors create
standardised workflows for all print technologies, deemed
crucial for companies working with diverse manufacturing
environments. But he also cautioned that there’s a
fundamental difference when it comes to binder jet, and
that’s down to the way part data is communicated to the
machine by images rather than toolpaths.
Motte elaborated: “There are two ways of delivering
content to the binder jetting machine. The first way is by
providing slices to the machine that are converted into
images or immediately provide images to the machine.
Materialise currently provides slices to the Desktop Metal
machines but we are currently also looking into providing
images directly from the build processor.”
Despite being around for more than two
decades, binder jet remains a complex
process yet its advantages in terms of speed,
material diversity and perhaps most relevant
today, sustainability, make a compelling
proposition for production applications.
Simufact’s Robertson added: “The industry
needs a tool that is useful and enables AM
specialists and engineers to build parts
successfully and repeatably. If we can do that
well, then everyone wins.”
Read more:
mytct.co/MBJsoftware
29.1 / www.tctmagazine.com / 027
 THE BIG KW SP
Laura Griffiths gets a remote first look inside
the UK’s new Digital Manufacturing Centre.
K
ieron Salter sports a hard hat and high vis
vest and walks us, literally and figuratively,
through his vision for the future of UK
advanced manufacturing. Standing at the
epicentre of the UK’s engineering cluster at Silverstone
Park, the CEO and founder of KW Special Projects tours
his audience through a 2,000 square metre facility that’s
soon to be filled with rows of polymer and metal additive
manufacturing systems that will make up a brand-new
Digital Manufacturing Centre (DMC).
Providing this whistle stop visit via YouTube and
speaking with TCT over Zoom, it’s not exactly the kind of
‘through the doors’ feature we envisioned pre-pandemic
but as the final pieces come together ready for a 2021
launch, Salter shares how those challenges of the last
year have emphasised how valuable the DMC and its
digital toolset could be for British manufacturing.
“It made us question whether what we're doing is
valid,” Salter told TCT. “Additive manufacturing is still a
growing sector. We're trying to carve a marketplace out
of something that's still growing. So, it was always a risk
but we had an even bigger risk when COVID came along.
We had to question really whether what we were doing
was the right thing and whether it was the right time,
particularly because two of our early adopter sectors,
[which] we believed were going to be aerospace and
automotive, got hit quite hard by the direct impact of
COVID. We came to the conclusion that actually we
believe additive manufacturing and digital manufacturing
in particular were going to be an important part of the
recovery.”
Similar to how we work and communicate became
largely digital overnight, Salter suggests manufacturers
and industry must now take a similar agile approach
in order to become more efficient and resilient. The
DMC is setting itself up to be a qualified supply chain
for onshoring and exporting UK manufacturing and will
function as a technology partner for companies within
automotive, aerospace, defence, industrial, medical and
space sectors. AM is a big part of that strategy. Having
founded engineering company KW Special Projects
back in 2012 and provided extensive polymer printing
capabilities primarily to the automotive sector, the DMC is
an extension of Salter’s ambitions to scale up and expand
into metal AM across multiple industries.
“We didn't want to just have a small step change from
where we were, we wanted to build a very capable
industrial scale production facility, Salter says of the
DMC’s early plans. The pieces of the puzzle started to
fall into place when the project was granted 3.2 million
GBP in Local Growth funding through a public-private
028 / www.tctmagazine.com / 29.1
WORDS: LAURA GRIFFITHS
partnership with South East Midlands Local Enterprise
Partnership (SEMLEP) and a well-timed extension to a
site by MEPC at Silverstone Park provided KWSP with
the ideal location to create a purpose-built technology
agnostic facility.
“Our differentiator is the fact that we're an engineering-
led business,” Salter said. “We, first and foremost, are
engineers that design parts and systems, and we're
now offering the manufacturing solutions to go with it.
We're always seeking new technologies. The DMC is
not just open for business but open for partnerships and
collaboration and so if there are American, European,
Asian companies that want to have a base in the UK, we
can offer that. If they've got technologies they want to
demonstrate in the UK, we can do that. That's the sort
of thing we're trying to build; a real hub of additive and
digital manufacturing at Silverstone.”
That collaborative philosophy also filters into its
chosen technologies, curated with support from UK-
based AM equipment provider Laserlines and British
machine manufacturers such as RPS and Renishaw, the
latter of which the DMC recently placed an order with for
two of its quad-laser RenAM 500Q metal AM systems.
Describing the partnership with Renishaw as a “close
collaboration,” it’s a two-way street, as Salter explains,
that will grant the DMC access to the latest technology
capabilities but also provide critical feedback and
learnings to OEMs to help drive efficiencies.
In addition to printing technology, the DMC intends to
provide end-to-end production capabilities with a UK-first
fully connected digital workflow that follows parts from
design through to inspection via Renishaw Connect.
Within that workflow, the DMC also houses ancillary
hardware including post-processing equipment from
polymer finishing and colouring expert DyeMansion and
DMG MORI advanced CNC machinery secured through a
partnership with Produmax, a Yorkshire-based precision
engineering specialist within the aerospace industry,
which has since set up a satellite centre at the Silverstone
site.
“It’s not just additive, it's around digital and
connectivity,” Salter said. “It's all about providing
engineering services that lead through to complete
manufacturing and to cover a range of technologies.
So, polymers and a range of metal capabilities including
aluminium, Scalmalloy, titanium, but also some newer
technologies that we’re either involved in developing or
developing ourselves like ceramics.”
Of course, all of this equipment requires a skilled
team to run it and Salter has been busy assembling
 THROUGH
INSPEX
THE DOORS

PECIAL PROJECT a crew of experts across additive

SHOWN: and engineering to deliver on
RENDER SHOWING FULL-SCALE this ambition. Over the next five
ADVANCED MANUFACTURING
AMBITIONS years, Salter says the DMC has
the potential to create as many
as 50 jobs for the local area. To
attract the right talent, particularly
younger would-be engineers, the
DMC has been designed to promote
a clean contemporary picture of
manufacturing with collaboration
zones, hot desking and education
centres which can be utilised by
schools and universities to inspire a
new generation of engineers.

That learning aspect also extends

to conversations the DMC is already
having with potential customers,
large and small, around the benefits
of various advanced manufacturing
techniques whether it’s using AM for

“The DMC is jigs and fixtures, optimising a design

for part consolidation or deploying

not just open Additive Casting technology,

which the Centre recently added

for business in a partnership with Enable

Manufacturing.

but open for SHOWN:

THE DIGITAL MANUFACTURING “3D printing metal parts isn't

partnerships and
CENTRE AT SILVERSTONE PARK
always the right solution but quite
often printing the tooling is and
collaboration.” then you can make a homogenous
part from a cast material rather
than worrying about the parameter
optimisation for a laser powder
bed material,” Salter explains. “We
want to make sure we've got all
those bases covered and that we
are focused on solving customers
problems, not trying to force square
pegs into round holes.”

As more machines settle in at

the DMC and the team continues
to grow, the DMC is on track for
its grand opening later this year.
Hopefully, it won’t be too long before
we can go through the doors for real.

Salter adds: “We hope that at the

end of this we [can] stick a big Union
Jack on the front of the building
and the UK Government can point
at it and say ‘well, that's what we're
talking about.’ It's another case study.
It's another success story. And this is
what we do best.”

29.1 / www.tctmagazine.com / 029

 STANDARDS & CERTIFICATION
GETTING UP
TO STANDARD
A
step forward on the path to
a greener future for aviation
and the demonstration
of the company’s ability
to commercialise a transformational
technology.
This is how Samuel, Son & Co.,
Limited’s CEO Colin Osborne described
the news that Boeing had approved
Samuel subsidiary Burloak Technologies
as a supplier of additively manufactured
aluminium parts earlier this year. For
Burloak, it had been a long time coming.
Founded in 2005, the additive
manufacturing (AM) service provider had
aligned with Samuel in 2017 before the
metal manufacturing firm took complete
control of the company 12 months ago. The
timing was no coincidence. Burloak has
always backed its technical competence
but knew in order to supply the likes of
Boeing, it needed to prove scalability.
In the years prior, Burloak had often
refused to take orders if it couldn’t see
where AM added value and placed a
greater focus on understanding the
minutiae of how the technology needed
to work. Peter Adams, Burloak’s founder
and Chief Innovation Officer, estimates the
company turned away 95% of the people
that contacted them in this time, shying
away from the swell in interest around AM
after GE started investing big.
“We weren’t trying to be all things to all
people,” he tells TCT, “we were determined
that we were going to fundamentally
understand the process, understand where
it fits in the market and how to apply it well.”
After 15 years of ‘doing things the hard
way’, the company felt AM was ready
to be applied for production
applications in the aviation
030 / www.tctmagazine.com / 29.1
sector. While it has always provided
engineering and AM services, the
company had established a ‘long-
term vision,’ setting its stall in the
aerospace sector, and working out
how it would best position itself to
meet the demanding specifications
of the likes of Boeing. This involved
building its own Metallic Material
Properties Development and
Standardisation (MMDPS) database
to show full understanding and
traceability of the materials, as well
as adjusting the parameters of every
AM machine it has ever owned. While
Adams accepts there is a cause to do
this to tackle the different applications
and demands, there has always been
a need to because of the instability of
the processes.
“There’s still not a perfect machine
on the market,” Adams assesses.
“What we’re looking for is more stable
production. I can bring a machine in,
I can dial that and meet a customer
spec. But when the next machines
arrive of a [duplicate] model, I expect
every one to be identical, because
we’re now using tens of machines to
support [application] programmes.
We still spend a lot of time with our
engineers tuning them for what we
know works. And that makes scaling
the industry a challenge. You wouldn’t
expect that in the CNC environment,
we shouldn’t be willing to live with it in
the AM world.”
Adams notes that if Burloak
was to buy a CNC machine from
Matsuura, DMG Mori or Mazak, it
would expect each to demonstrate
a similar precision and repeatability
WORDS: SAM DAVIES
‘within a reasonable tolerance band.’ The
company has never been able to say the
same for AM. And though Burloak is not
at liberty to detail what was required to
meet the Boeing BAC 5673 specification,
Adams says in every other customer
spec the control of machine parameters,
along with control of input materials
and file preparation, are fundamental
considerations.
It has not always been straightforward
for AM technology to meet specifications
like this, but after 15 years of groundwork,
Boeing has now certified the supply of
aluminium AlSi10mg parts, produced with
powder bed fusion technology, to a range
of application programmes. Burloak will
be the one to supply them and Adams
believes it is testament to the focus it has
placed on extensive datasets and the
backing of its parent organisation.
“I think we’re now at that cutover point
where things are going into production in
a big way and that’s driven by companies
like Burloak having deep and meaningful
datasets around the material and the
material performance, demonstrating
it in a repeatable way,” says Adams.
“But having a company such as Boeing
demonstrate that this can be done at
scale is the real exciting thing about
this, because it sets the stage that the
time is now right. The market is such,
with the disruption and fragility of the
supply chain, that having companies like
Burloak who [have] multibillion dollar
parents behind them and have got the
demonstrated ability to meet
these difficult specs, shows
the scalability of additive
is there.”
 NEWS

AM INDUSTRY NEWS
DESKTOP METAL ACQUIRES
ENVISIONTEC
Just as Desktop Metal hinted
when going public last year, the
company has quickly sought to pursue
opportunities in the AM market’s
consolidation. In a 300 million USD
deal, Desktop Metal has taken over
EnvisionTEC to mark its expansion
into polymer additive manufacturing,
adding another suite of office-friendly
solutions to its growing product
portfolio. EnvisionTEC founder Al
Siblani will stay on as the brand’s
CEO, with Desktop Metal believing the
transaction will provide a gateway into
new markets.
“Together, we have more than 200
distribution partners around the world
that extend our reach into applications
across fast-growing markets for
additive manufacturing, such as dental,
medical, and jewellery, in addition
PROTOLABS IN 3D HUBS
TAKEOVER
Consolidation is happening on the
service provider side of the industry too.
In a 280 million USD deal, Protolabs
has acquired 3D Hubs, giving the
international company access to 3D
Hubs’ global network of manufacturing
partners and ‘reinforcing Protolabs’
commitment to being the go-to
resource in contract manufacturing.’ The
companies believe their complementary
tech capacity and services can
to doubling down on the broader
industrial market,” commented Desktop
Metal founder and CEO Ric Fulop.
“I’m more confident than ever we can
accelerate the adoption of AM 2.0 and
help customers transform how parts
are made around the world.”
enable supply chain agility and
‘unprecedented’ speed to market, with
Protolabs EMEA VP and Managing
Director Bjoern Klaas telling TCT
Protolabs is now a global leader.
“Despite the ongoing crisis
around the COVID-19 pandemic,
we look to the future with a great
deal of optimism. The Innovators
around the world see themselves as
key to solving many of the world’s
most significant challenges, but
it’s the ongoing revolution within
manufacturing that is helping to drive
innovation,” he said. “For this reason
alone, the Protolabs acquisition
of 3D Hubs is truly exciting. With
the acquisition now complete,
we’ve created the world’s most
comprehensive digital manufacturing
provision for design engineers around
the world.”
FORMLABS REINTRODUCES FUSE 1
Just as we were beginning to wonder
what happened to Formlabs’ office-
friendly SLS efforts, CEO Max Lobovsky
reassured us towards the end of 2020
that the commercial availability of Fuse
1 wasn’t far off. In January, the company
formally announced that its mission to
‘do with SLS what we did with SLA’ was
back on track. Fuse 1 was re-introduced
to the market alongside a post-
processing station called FuseSift and
a Nylon 12 powder, while it also boasts
a modular build chamber to enable
continuous printing. Its Surface Armor
technology combats the ‘orange peel’
surface texture issue of SLS, and the
machine can also print with up to 70%
reused powder with a material refresh
rate of 30%.
“SLS technology has long been
trusted by engineers and large
manufacturers for its ability to print
strong, functional prototypes and end-
use parts, but its high cost and complex
workflow have historically confined it
to large companies,” Dávid Lakatos,
Chief Product Officer of Formlabs, told
TCT. “The Fuse 1 and Fuse Sift improve
on the unique advantages offered
by SLS, while bringing it within reach
for companies of all sizes and types
through unprecedented affordability
and ease of use.”

SATORI X GANIT GOLDSTEIN Wang said: “Our vision is to be the

= 3D PRINTED JEWELLERY
Having only come to market with its
ST1600 Masked Stereolithography system
last year, Satori has wasted no time in
partnering with a renowned user of 3D
printing technology. Working alongside
Ganit Goldstein, the pair have developed
a collection of necklaces that are
embedded with WiFi-controlled LED lights
and are printed in one piece within 25
minutes and at a maximum cost of 3k GBP.
Speaking to TCT, Satori CEO Chengxi
innovation powerhouse to empower
individuals and organisations.
Therefore, we include our end users,
whether it’s fashion designers,
dentists, or engineers, in our 3D printer
development process. The Satori x
Ganit 3D printed jewellery collection
is a demonstration of how we adopt a
collaborative and inclusive approach
to push affordable professional 3D
printing to the frontier of industrial
application.”

29.1 / www.tctmagazine.com / 031

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27.1 / www.tctmagazine.com / 049
 Expert Advisory Column
UNDERSTANDING
THE INVESTMENT
CASE FOR AM
L
ike most 8-year olds, I had no
idea what my father did back
in 1979. Frankly, I don't think I
cared. As long as it meant we
could afford a colour television to watch
Ed Stewart on Crackerjack I was happy.
It wasn't until I was about nineteen
that I mentioned to my father some
problems I was having on my college
summer placement at Vickers Nuclear
Engineering. I was rotating through the
departments and had 'sadly landed' in the
quality control department. I was baffled.
They wanted me to review their newly
created ISO9000 documentation to see
how it compared to their previous BS5750
documentation. "Yawn"…
Little did I know that my father was both
the cause of my problem and the solution!
Back in the mid-1970s, my father
was the quality control manager at the
Dutch appliance manufacturer Philips
(my parents were very lazy naming their
children). The company had a strong
quality and safety ethos and co-opted my
father onto a British Standards Institute
(BSI) working group to develop a standard
for manufacturing production procedures.
This activity led to the publication of
BS5750. My father spent the next few
years helping different manufacturing
companies adopt and embed
BS5750 before transitioning his
knowledge across to ISO9000
and ultimately ISO9001.
It took my father about
30-seconds to explain what
I needed to do to keep
the QA manager at Vickers
happy. He then spent the
next few hours explaining
why standards are vital to
the success of companies,
supply chains and industries
as a whole.
Fast forward another
30-years, and like good-old
dad, I also found myself sitting
in a BSI working group. Albeit
with a few differences.
In early 2019, I was asked
by BSI and their sponsors
UK Research & Innovate
034 / www.tctmagazine.com / 29.1
WORDS: PHIL REEVES
(UKRI) to write a guide for senior
executives and finance professionals to
help them understand the business case
for investment in additive manufacturing
(AM) and 3D printing. The rationale being
that the engineers who understand
AM/3DP don't always know what the
budget holders want to hear and struggle
to secure investment. Inversely, the
budget holders don't always know what
questions to ask or which stones to turn
over to find the 'real-cost' or 'risk' of
AM/3DP technology adoption.
In late 2020, after 18-months working
with BSI, UKIR, and a group of industry
stakeholders, we finally published
PAS6001:2020 - Factors to be considered
in making and assessing the business
case for additive manufacturing and
3D printing. PAS6001 is a fast-track
standardisation document, which defines
good practice when building or evaluating
the business case for AM/3DP investment.
Many readers of TCT might overlook
the value of such a document; after all,
AM/3DP technology has been around for
over 30-years, so surely procurement and
implementation is easy.
Not so.
In the 18-years I have been delivering
AM/3DP strategy consultancy; I have seen
my fair share of poor technology due
diligence and investment trainwrecks.
These often stem from business
executives' unrealistic want and needs,
who often see AM/3DP as some enabler
for 'manufacturing revolution'. Inversely,
many investment errors also come from
the magpie-like egos of R&D departments,
who see a shiny new toy they need to
justify.
About five or six years ago, I was asked
to run an innovation workshop in a large
American heavy machinery company.
The idea, or so I thought, was to identify
applications where AM/3DP could impact
the companies topline revenue or reduce
waste and grow bottom-line profitability.
However, unbeknown to me, there was
a poorly hidden agenda. When I arrived,
I was asked if I could tailor the workshop
slightly to 'focus on possible applications
that would make good use of the
machines that had already acquired?'
As it turned out, the companies
senior management were 'so bought
into AM/3DP' they had 'released' a 2
million USD budget to engineering and
procurement to embed AM/3DP into the
business. Doing what good procurement
people do, they had negotiated a
fantastic price of two large platform
metals machines with all the whistles,
bells and ancillary technology. However,
it was obvious to the trained eye that the
technology was a total mismatch for the
business needs.
Inversely, I have also seen this story
played out in reverse, where the
engineers have identified the most
appropriate technology for a given
application, only for procurement
and management to cut a PO for
a 'more cost-effective platform'.
Again, the result is the same,
an underutilised machine and
a bitter taste all round.
Inside the next
issue: A conversation
with Reeves on the
role of PAS6001 in
justifying a business
case for AM.
 LEARN MORE
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3D PRINTING & ADDITIVE MANUFACTURING INTELLIGENCE

28

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