Additive Companies Run Production Parts
Some customers understand the inherent value of manufacturing using additive fabrication technologies - the flexibility of tool-less production, the freedom of impossible geometries, the reduction of manufacturing waste. Others don't; Curt Taylor, president of Rapid Quality Manufacturing (RQM), says its not unusual for a company to issue his company an RFQ for its standard CNC part prints. "We jokingly call it customers that get it and customers that don't," he says.
Increasingly, more and more customers are getting it. Four years ago, RQM didn't exist. Today the Ohio company is a leader in a new breed of enterprises that
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Customers that get it know that they'll need to redesign their parts to reap the advantages of rapid manufacturing. Due to the removal of conventional machining or casting limitations, parts in assemblies can often be consolidated. Taylor recalls one customer who was able to reduce a 12-part assembly down to seven pieces. Manufacturers must also optimize their designs to account for the part's build process.
Customers that get it know that, so far, due to the expense (a DMLS machine costs $600,000 USD and up), it only make sense to rapid manufacture certain high-value parts or assemblies. In metal manufacturing, these have mostly been biocompatible medical and dental implants, and aerospace components. In January, RQM announced a partnership with 3M ESPE for the production of customized cobalt chromium dental copings and bridges.
Customers that get it know that they have to be flexible and patient enough to develop new standards. As Taylor puts it: "Nothing is really new. The only challenge: everything is new." The same parts are being made from the same base materials, but the process is totally different.
"The key hurdle is really validating the process to control your quality with and between machines and from one producer to another," says Taylor. This means validating raw materials and finished products. For its powder metal raw material, RQM has developed analyzing procedures. For validating sample coupons and finished products against ASTM standards and material specification sheets, RQM uses a MTS Landmark Test System. The Landmark does static and dynamic testing, including durability, tension, compression, fatigue crack growth, and fracture toughness. RQM is also working toward an AS9100 Aerospace Certification and ISO 13485 certification for medical devices.
"The challenging part is meeting customer internal requirements that they believe give them a competitive advantage," Taylor says. These include things like unique facility security requirements, proprietary material quality issues, and how to define special processes. Further complicating matters is when RQM has to work with customers in Europe. "There are different expectations and different requirements based on different standards around the world," says Taylor.
To surmount these and other challenges, RQM is fortunate to have a parent company to lean on. Morris Technologies, Inc. (MTI) is located about 10 miles away, and is dedicated to prototype and short-run applications. Founded in 1994, MTI worked with EOS to refine the German manufacturers' DMLS machines. Today, MTI has five DMLS machines; RQM has three. In July, MTI will take delivery of its first EOSINT M 270 system to laser sinter titanium. By the end of the year, Taylor hopes to have one at RQM too.
Taylor likes the DMLS technology because of its dimensional accuracy on small to medium-size parts, along with a good general surface finish. But he's looking at other technologies as well. "To be a manufacturing center of excellence, we'll have all of the above in the future," he says. "Eventually, I'll probably have an Arcam [electron beam melting] machine. But right now, if I had five different technologies, I'd have five different processes to validate for my customers."
Select Equipment Suppliers for Metal Direct Digital Manufacturing:
Arcam - Electron Beam Melting (EBM)
Concept Laser - LaserCUSING
EOS - Direct Metal Laser Sintering (DMLS)
MCP Systems - Selective Laser Melting (SLM)
Optomec - Laser Engineered Net Shaping (LENS)
Select Service Providers for Metal Direct Digital Manufacturing:
3T RPD (UK) - DMLS
CalRAM (California) - EBM
Central University of Technology (South Africa) - DMLS
CMRDI (Egypt) - LaserCUSING
CRP Technology (Italy) - EBM & SLM
Design Dynamics International (Colorado) - EBM
Directed MFG, a division of Forecast 3D (Texas) - SLS & DMLS
Fruth Innovative Technologien (Germany) - DMLS & EBM
GPI Prototype & Manufacturing Services (Illinois) - DMLS
GROWit (California) - DMLS & EBM
HARBEC Plastics (New York) - DMLS
Initial (France) - DMLS
LayerWise (Belgium) - SLM
Linear Mold & Engineering (Michigan) - DMLS
Materials Solutions (UK) - DMLS
Medical Modeling (Colorado) - EBM
Melotte (Belgium) - EBM & SLM
Metaltec Innovations, a div. of ProMetal, an Ex One Company (Pennsylvania) - 3DP
Morris Technologies (Ohio) - DMLS
MTT Technologies Group (UK & Tennesseee) - SLM
P.H. Polyplast (India) - DMLS
Protocam (Pennsylvania) - SLS
Protocast (Italy) - EBM & SLM
ProtoService (Italy) - DMLS
Rapid Quality Manufacturing (Ohio) - DMLS
Riviplast (Italy) - DMLS
Synergeering Group (Michigan) - EBM
Vaupell (Washington) - DMLS
XinFuMind (China) - EBM
Posted by admin on Wednesday, 24-Jun-2009 08:38 AM
Electroplating Transforms RP Models
When Sean Wise incorporated RePliForm in 2000, the Baltimore company concentrated on electroformed tooling for the manufacture of out-of-production parts. Original parts were used as patterns to produce nickel-faced cavities and cores capable of running thousands of parts.
"One day one customer said they weren't interested in the tooling - ‘Can you just coat our parts'?" remembers Wise. The customer - Pitney Bowes - wanted to test alternative part designs for a new mailing machine. "'We're probably not the only company that can use this,'" Wise recalls a Pitney Bowes engineer saying at the time. "Sure enough, they were right."
That was 2002. Today, RePliForm's RePliKote "armor coating" process for rapid prototypes is the majority of the company's business. The copper-nickel composite coating is desired by customers for one of three improvements:
- Strength
- Sealing
- Appearance
The electroplating of sterelithography (SLA) and other plastic RP parts has proved so popular, RePliForm now has new competition. Starting this week in May, National RPSupport (NRPS) Inc. will begin offering a similar plating process that it is licensing from AT 3D-SQUARED, a Swiss/UK company that has offered the technology in Europe since 2007 through its sister company 3DDC.
"The interest we've received has almost been overwhelming," NRPS President Dennis Fogle tells RapidToday. The Iowa company historically has sold, maintained, and provided consulting services for stereolithography equipment, and has set up a separate website to market and sell the Metalise it...America service.
"The process is essentially the same [as the RePliKote process]," says Fogle. Parts are typically submerged in a copper solution for 12 hours, a nickel solution
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The Metalise it process was developed for rapid prototyping models, but can be used on most vacuum cast and injection molded plastic parts as well. Thin-walled parts aren't conducive to plating, inVision parts must be dewaxed, and a special pre-treatment (for removing support material) is required for parts created using Objet's polyjet process. Plating of aluminum materials is not currently possible.
Proponents of electroplating say the process provides the benefits of metal rapid manufacturing without the cost. "SLA costs only one-tenth as much as a DMLS [direct metal laser sintering] part," says Wise. Coating a plastic part typically adds a 30-40% premium to its cost.
Besides aerospace, medical, and automotive, auto racing is one industry that uses the technology frequently. Formula One teams use coated rapid prototype models for aerodynamic testing in wind tunnels. The plated models replicate traditional carbon fiber parts and provide a 10-fold increase in stiffness over naked SLA and SLS parts.
According to testing DSM Somos has done on parts made with its ProtoTool stereolithography resin, property improvements of 30% in flexural strength, 100% in flexural modulus, and 540% in impact resistance are achieved when the parts are coated. Somos partnered with RePliForm starting in 2003 to clad parts made from its materials, notably NanoTool and ProtoGen. Its so-called MC2 process is performed by RePliForm after the parts are built by one of Somos' service bureau partners: Laser Reproductions (Ohio), FineLine Prototyping (North Carolina), or R&M Engineering (Michigan).
Plating is also used in sealing and barrier applications. Photo-cured SLA resins are sensitive to heat and humidity. A thin plate allows for underwater use of SLA parts, minimizing problem swelling. A metal coat is also useful for blocking out-gassing, controlling electromagnetic (EMI) and radio frequency (RF) interference, heat deflection, and flame retardency. RePliForm coated parts for the International Space Station that had to be non-flammable.
The art and jewelry fields use electroplating too, for decorative purposes. California-based artist Bathsheba Grossman has used RePliForm to coat her artworks in copper and/or nickel.
A third company involved in RP model coating is Tennessee-based PAR3 Technology, which holds the rights to the RP Tempering technologies, which are generally brushed or sprayed on.
Posted by admin on Monday, 11-May-2009 15:11 PM
RM May Deliver Carbon & Cost Savings
Consider this: The light-weighting of parts (due to honeycomb interiors) through additive layer manufacturing could be a much more important advantage of rapid manufacturing (RM) than the lack of tooling required. This is one of the early findings of a ground-breaking UK project.
Started about a year ago, and scheduled to run through 2011, the Atkins Project is a US$4.1M university/industry collaboration that seeks to revolutionize
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(The project is primarily looking at metallic RM, specifically MTT Technologies' Selective Laser Melting (SLM) technology. Despite the relative immaturity of metallic machines relative to polymeric systems, metallic RM has a couple advantages. One is the ability to reuse excess material from metallic builds; in the plastic RM evaluated by Atkins, much of the excess material is lost, due to thermal material property changes. Metal RM parts also have mechanical properties that better match traditionally-manufactured metal components; plastic RM parts are still for the most part too different from traditional engineering polymers.)
In addition to industrial partners like Boeing, Caterpillar, and Bentley Motors, small UK-based rapid manufacturing consultancy Econolyst Ltd has a prominent role in the study. Econolyst is responsible for developing the software and processes necessary to control a "Grid-RM" supply chain. The company is also developing an online carbon and economic impact assessment tool to compare metallic RM processes against CNC machining & casting. (Also check out their side project: Per-Snickety, an enterprise dedicated to developing systems to 3D-print video game characters.)
Following is a recent email interview RapidToday conducted with Econolyst Managing Director Dr. Phil Reeves.
RapidToday: Where does the Atkins Project get its name from and what is the project's overall budget and funding sources?
Reeves: The name Atkins was a joke that stuck. Basically, the UK government was putting funding into Low Carbon Manufacturing research. When we first started talking about the project three years ago we referred to it as ‘low-carb' rapid manufacturing. The objective of the project is also about making light-weight parts. Because of the US low-carb Atkins diet, we jokingly started referring to the projects as the Atkins Project. After a few months, no one could find a better name and it stuck.
The project overall budget is £2.9M [US$4.1M]. This is made up from £1.45M from the UK government Technology Strategy Board and £1.45M from the industrial partners. The project is what we call a 100% cost project, in that all the partners have to spend £1.45M in total on the project to lever down the £1.45M from government.
Of the £1.45M of funding, a large percentage will be going to Loughborough University, where the low carbon production system is being developed. Econolyst accounts for approximately 10% of the industrial contribution.
RapidToday: What are the principles and drivers behind Atkins and why is additive manufacturing being investigated in this way?
Reeves: We believe that additive manufacturing could enable five fundamental economic and environmental business benefits, particularly for transport-related components. First, as we know, additive processes allow us to design parts differently. One of these differences is the ability to design with optimum strength-to-weight ratios. This has two effects: (1) the part requires less raw material and (2), the final part weighs less. This is important, particularly in aerospace, as weight equals fuel usage, cost and carbon. Also, materials such as titanium are expensive, so it makes no sense to purchase a billet of materials and then send 95% back into the supply chain as chippings. Also the design freedoms of additive manufacturing allow us to design and produce more efficient products, particularly those with fluid or gas channels. The two other benefits that we are investigating are the efficiencies of metallic additive process compared to casting or machining and also the configuration of the supply chain used to make parts, as we are no longer constrained by fixed assets such as tooling. This element of the project we are calling digitally distributed manufacturing.
RapidToday: Generally, what are the data exchange processes required for digitally distributed manufacturing? Is it as easy as, for all vendors that are signed up, checking first for geographic relevancy, then excess capacity?
Reeves: In terms of signing up vendors, it is far more complicated that just looking at geography and capacity. The analogy I give it that of CNC machining. There are literally millions of 5-Axis CNC milling machines globally, but ownership does not make you a validated supplier to Boeing for instance. But Boeing buys CNC machined parts on a global basis. What we are working on within the partnership is supply chain validation protocols for RM.
We are very much in the early stages of this at the moment, but we envisage a world similar to the current machining supply chain, where some companies will specialize in certain sectors (aero, auto, medical) and others will offer generic capacity.
In distributed RM the objective is to have multiple distributed suppliers that can utilize under capacity to keep costs down, but also where manufacture can be as close as possible to part consumption. What we are developing is an intelligent print queue to manage this process. The software looks at who are validated suppliers and their location, and then manages the flow of information within the supply chain.
Irrespective of manufacturing location, the overall objective of Atkins is to ensure that the life cycle carbon footprint of parts is lower than traditional manufacturing and that the life cycle economics of using additive processes are also equal or lower than traditional processes.
RapidToday: Has anyone tried to calculate the carbon and economic impact of building new distributed manufacturing facilities and rapid manufacturing equipment. Existing infrastructure may not be very efficient, but it is existing.
Reeves: Great question! To our knowledge this is the first time that anyone has attempted to calculate the carbon benefits of distributed manufacture and the life cycle impact of parts made using additive processes. There are lots of studies about ‘food miles' and purchasing goods that are grown closer to the point of consumption. We are using some of this thinking as our reference materials. However, when it comes to calculating the carbon footprint of let's say a CNC-machined aerospace bracket against a selective laser melted part over a 30-year life cycle, we are very much treading new ground. This is where the Atkins partnership is vital, as through the partnership we have access to a lot of traditional manufacturing processes, complex existing global supply chains and products such as commercial vehicles, motorsport components, prestige cars and long haul and short haul airliners.
In terms of the technologies themselves, efficiency is a vital consideration for Atkins as a project. MTT Technologies - which makes the SLM process sold by 3D Systems in the USA - is one of our partners. At present the best-in-class metallic additive processes use fibre lasers with around 20% efficiency. Hence, 80% of the energy going into the laser is lost as heat. As part of Atkins we are trying to understand where the losses in the manufacturing process are and how they could be re-used.
At present we are developing a web-enabled comparator for metallic RM parts which we will be beta testing with the Atkins partners this summer. This will allow them to make real time environmental and economic comparisons between RM and their current manufacturing processes. We think the key to RM adoption is in considering the environmental and economic benefits of the part over its entire lifecycle, not just the fact that RM mitigates machining or tooling.
RapidToday: How will the online assessment tool work? What major assumptions are made in the algorithms?
Reeves: The on-line assessment tool is based on the new British standard for carbon foot-printing and looks at the five main contributors to carbon. These are raw material, manufacturing production, product distribution, in-life product use and end-of-life product disposal.
In terms of raw material, we look at comparing the raw material used for conventional CNC machining (billet) or casting ...
Posted by admin on Thursday, 12-Mar-2009 15:40 PM
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