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3D PRINTING

Will Additive Manufacturing Take Flight?Technology gaps remain—amid skyrocketing interest—in an industry where aerospace, medical, and automotive are projected to generate the greatest demand

By Mark Shortt

Terry Wohlers didn’t hesitate when asked to sum up his most important take away from this year’s SME Rapid Conference and Exposition, an annual showcase of additive manufacturing tech-nology held in June in Pittsburgh, where he delivered a “State of the Industry” keynote address.

“Unprecedented interest,” Wohlers replied. “I’m seeing un-precedented interest in additive manufacturing, or 3D printing, and I’m just amazed at the kinds of inquiries that we’re getting.”

Wohlers, president of the additive manufacturing consulting firm Wohlers Associates, Inc., said that inquiries about the tech-nology are pouring in not just from manufacturers, but also from government agencies and companies whose interest might come as somewhat of a surprise. One was from SAP, the Germany-based, multinational company known for its development of enterprise applications software and related services. The company sees itself as a “technology thought leader” that seeks to help compa-nies adopt innovative new technologies that can transform their businesses.

“We met with SAP about six months ago in Germany, and they outlined their plans,” said Wohlers in a recent telephone inter-view. “They’re a company that you wouldn’t think would have an interest in this. But if you’re going to integrate additive manufac-turing enterprise-wide, and you’re a company with multiple sites and you’re getting inputs from various sites and manufacturing at other sites, then the IT infrastructure that would need to be in place is pretty high. And so SAP sees this as an opportunity.”

Wohlers Report 2013, published by Wohlers Associates as an in-depth analysis of the worldwide additive manufacturing industry, reported earlier this year that the market for 3D printing (used interchangeably with additive manufacturing) in 2012, consisting of sales of all products and services worldwide, grew 28.6 percent to $2.204 billion, up from $1.714 billion in 2011. Wohlers Associ-ates expects strong double digit growth to continue over the next several years, forecasting the market to approach $6 billion by 2017 and reach $10.8 billion by 2021.

Lux Research, publisher of another report that analyzes 3D printing’s commercial potential, is forecasting 3D printing to grow into an $8.4 billion market in 2025 (up from $777 million in 2012), with sales of products and services to the automotive, medical, and aerospace industries leading the way. The report, titled, “Building the Future: Assessing 3D Printing’s Opportuni-

ties and Challenges,” predicts rapid and widespread adoption for medical applications as 3D scanning technologies, printers, and materials fall in price. The medical market, pegged at $11 million in 2012, is projected to grow to $1.9 billion in 2025.

“3D printing offers design flexibility and rapid implementa-tion, but development needs remain in materials performance and printer throughput,” stated Anthony Vicari, a research associate at Lux Research and the lead author of the report. “Over the longer term, 3D printing has potential to reshape the manufacturing ecosystem, but it will have the most impact in the near term for products that are made in small volumes, require high customiza-tion, and are more cost-tolerant.”

One reason why Terry Wohlers is bullish on the industry’s growth prospects is that he sees the industry in the midst of an exciting transition—from being a provider of largely prototype parts, to a provider of production parts for final products that are used in real world applications. Of the $2.2 billion in revenues generated worldwide from sales of additive manufacturing prod-ucts and services in 2012, Wohlers said, an estimated 28.3% is tied to the production of parts for final products, rather than models, prototypes, patterns, and other types of parts.

“We think by 2020, that 95 percent of all money spent on products and services related to additive manufacturing will be on parts for final products, not prototyping,” said Wohlers. “In fact, if you look at the growth trends, recent growth trends support that. In 2003, it was less than 4 percent, at 3.9 percent, and then if you fast forward to last year, it was 28.3 percent.”

How does Wohlers see the future of the additive manufactur-ing industry taking shape?

“It’s going a lot of directions simultaneously, and that’s partly what’s so exciting about it,” he answered. “Not that aerospace or medical will cool, but if it did, I think in 7 to 10 years, we’ll see automotive really begin to adopt it for manufacturing, and some other selected consumer product type industries as well, especially some of the online types of things. Rather than people having printers at home, they’ll go online and buy parts and products. That’s a business model that I think will really grow and expand.

“There are also other industries that are looking at this, and we’re seeing experimentation. For example, synthetic products are being implanted into humans, and bones and living tissue are being printed. There’s a lot of investment in that area. And

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so it’s going to be difficult in the future to find an industry that won’t be impacted by this. People like to have something that no one else has, and so we’ll see a lot of special types of products personalized and be one of a kind, and people will pay a premium for those things.”

GE Using Additive to Produce Combustion System Hardware for LEAP Jet Engine

As Manufacturing Technology Leader at GE Global Research in Niskayuna, N.Y., Luana Iorio oversees a number of labs on site, one of which is GE’s 3D printing activities. In one of its leading edge additive manufacturing programs, GE is using a laser-based additive manufacturing process to produce combustion system hardware that’s reportedly slated for use on CFM International’s LEAP jet engine by early 2016. But GE is also intensively evaluating additive manufacturing for its ability to solve a variety of other part production challenges, according to Ms. Iorio.

“We’re really looking across our entire product line at how we can use additive manufacturing to give us differentiated product performance, but also allow us to get into production more quickly,” said Ms. Iorio. “We have work that we’re doing in additive manufacturing for polymeric components, for ceramic based components, for metallic components, and we have activi-ties going on where we’re looking at our product portfolio in the health care space, oil and gas space, aviation space. So we’re really looking at a lot of different products.”

GE considers a number of factors when deciding where to use additive manufacturing. Among the differentiators, Iorio said, are components that are very complex or that require significant assembly of different subcomponents. “If we produce a part via additive manufacturing, we can eliminate some of those assembly steps and just produce a complex component in one piece,” she said. “But there are also many places where we’re looking to get a performance enhancement by being able to have a geometry

or design that’s just not possible with conventional manufactur-ing processes today.

“We feel like we’re specifically pushing the envelope in the use of additive manufacturing for what I’ll call functional materials,” Iorio continued. “3D printing has been around for a long time, and people have seen SLA prototypes that were visualization prototypes, which didn’t actually have to perform a function. We’re looking at building parts out of piezoelectric ceramics. That’s a function that we need to get from the material; not just that it geometrically looks correct. We’re also looking at building components in metal out of super alloys, which we use in the hot-test parts of some of our gas turbines. That’s where there aren’t good process parameters, recipes for hotter process materials like this, to get the material performance that you need using additive manufacturing. So that’s an area of specific focus at GE Global Research.”

Additive “really opens a lot of space for the designers,” Iorio explained, “when you recognize that you only need to put mate-rial where it’s actually doing useful work. Everywhere else, you can keep open, thinking about very radical, lattice structure components.” Across its numerous businesses, GE is working to make sure that its product designers are aware of the potential that additive holds for them to think very differently about product design.

“I think it’s difficult to overestimate the potential that additive manufacturing has on revolutionizing products and component design,” she continued. “Product designers have typically had different constraints placed on them, where they’re asking, ‘is this going to be cost effective to machine?’ or ‘is this going to be a geometry that can be made via casting or via forging?’ Whereas, with additive manufacturing, a lot of those constraints disappear, and designers can really think about exactly what it is that they want. And so we’re seeing the emergence of different design tools that take advantage of the freedoms that additive enables, and designers coming up with radically different look-ing components.”

Earlier this year, GE launched a pair of Open Innovation quests in an effort to build an additive manufacturing ecosystem that taps the design and production skills of 3D printing innova-tors throughout the world. One is a Jet Engine Bracket Design Quest, which seeks to make jet engines lighter by redesigning aircraft engine brackets. The Quest, which launched in June, drew nearly 700 global design entries via the Grab CAD platform’s

An aircraft engine bracket after geometric optimization created by the Direct Metal Laser Sintering additive manufacturing process. The improved part is 30% lighter, reducing the weight of the engine and improving fuel savings, while maintaining the original bracket’s structural integrity. Photo courtesy of GE Global Research.

A sample test part produced by additive manufacturing at GE Global Research. Photo courtesy of GE Global Research.

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community of entrepreneurs, institutions, and companies. The other is a3D Printing Production Quest that asks participants to use 3D printing technology to produce highly precise, complex parts for potential application in medical imaging and a broad spectrum of other GE businesses.

Calling it “hugely successful,” Iorio said that the Design Quest tapped into the huge amount of interest that people have in de-signing differently because of the freedom enabled by additive manufacturing.

“Additive really changes how you think about design,” Iorio said. “And the first quest that we put out, which was around the bracket for GE Aviation, is an exact example of this. We put out a functional specification, saying ‘Here are the functions that this bracket needs to perform—the loads that it needs to carry, the locations of bolt holes—and challenged people to think about what they could design with the least amount of weight, recogniz-ing that this is an aircraft engine application, so weight is always a premium. We put this Quest out from Grab CAD, and within a couple of weeks, I think we got 697 entries, which was pretty amazing to us, and a lot of very interesting concepts. Some of the lowest weight designs that we received, I think, saved on the order of 80 percent of the weight from the baseline bracket, which we use in our engines today, and are made here via machining.”

GE has selected the ten finalists and is currently in the process of actually building those designs to confirm that they are, in fact, manufacturable via additive. The designs will be tested to make sure that they can bear the specified loads, and the highest per-forming of those ten brackets will be receiving a monetary prize.

“We’re just at the cusp; we’re at the beginning, and so there’s still a lot more development that has to happen,” said Iorio. “There’s still a lot that’s going to evolve. But we’re extremely excited and see a lot of potential that additive manufacturing holds. GE’s commitment to additive manufacturing and using it in a diverse array of products is pretty firm, as some of our ac-quisitions have indicated. There are still a lot of challenges that we need to overcome, and that’s where working with material suppliers, equipment providers, software manufacturers, and designers is important. We’re committed to be in this space, and we expect that through some of these collaborations, together, we’ll further this technology.”

Technology Developer Works at Intersection of Advanced Materials and Additive Manufacturing

Over the last 13 years, Oxford Performance Materials (OPM) has built its business around exploiting the attributes of polyether-ether-ketone (PEKK), a high performance thermoplastic mol-ecule used in biomedical implants, industrial parts, and other demanding applications. Company president Scott DeFelice describes PEKK as a “polymer of last resort” that’s often used when other materials have failed to meet performance specifications in difficult environments. The company’s involvement with additive manufacturing dates back to 2006, when OPM began using the selective laser sintering (SLS) process.

“Typically, PEKK goes into really high-performance, industrial type requirements,” DeFelice said. “We’ve commercially sold the material into deep sea applications, semiconductor applications, biomedical applications, and aerospace applications. For 13 years, we’ve been exploiting the molecule in different ways and developing verticals off the attributes of the molecule. So we’ve combined that business model with additive manufacturing,

which, to us, is a very nice and enabling tool that establishes a new business platform.”

Combining its advanced materials expertise with 3D printing capabilities, OPM has steered its focus toward 3D printing of “mission-critical parts where there is no room for error,” such as those used in aerospace and medical applications. The company received FDA 510 (K) approval earlier this year for its OsteoFab™ Patient Specific Cranial Device, the first such approval for an additively manufactured polymer implant. And in July, OPM an-nounced that it has received a contract from Northrop Grumman Systems Corporation (NGSC) to develop its OXPEKK® polymer for use in aerospace applications. Oxford Performance Materials will be working to produce test specimens and prototype compo-nents that will allow for the establishment of a structural design database, a necessary requirement for the design of aerospace and other critical structures. The need for such a design database is “a big deal,” DeFelice said.

“We’ve been in the business of selling 3D printed tech struc-tures for a while now, mostly on our biomedical side of our busi-ness, and we know a lot about the performance of the product and the properties,” he said. “But when you get into the aerospace world, you need a very sophisticated statistical design database, which looks at the static and dynamic properties of the materials. Once you have that database, you can give that package to an engineer and say, ‘OK, go off and design parts with it.’ It’s been technically vetted to a statistical repeatability of 99.9 percent, and off you go. That’s sort of the box you need to check before broad adoption [of additive manufacturing].”

Oxford Performance Materials (www.oxfordpm.com) recently opened a new manufacturing facility in South Windsor, Conn., to support 3D printing of mission-critical, OXPEKK aerospace components. The new facility, located near OPM’s current headquarters and manufacturing operations, will be used for production of additively manufactured industrial and aerospace parts, and for research and development. Offering finite element analysis and design, the facility has the capacity to house up to six additional laser sintering 3D printers. The company, which acquired its first EOSINT P 800 HTLS machine two years ago and has been using it to produce its OsteoFab™ medical implants, purchased its second in July and is on target to install the machine at the new facility this fall.

According to DeFelice, the EOSINT P800 HTLS is the only commercially available machine that can operate in the process conditions that OPM’s polymers require.

A GE materials scientist peering into an SLM280 machine while it makes a test part. Photo courtesy of GE Global Research.

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“PEKK is a polymer that doesn’t lose any mechanicals up to 150ºC,” said DeFelice. “It’s inert; nothing but really concen-trated, high temperature acids are going to take it away, or do anything to it. It’s got 10,000 (MPa) tensile strength, 23,000 (MPa) compressive strength. This is a structurally robust, stable, high temperature, chemical-resistant, gamma stable, sterilizable, radiation-resistant polymer, with a list of unique selling proposi-tions as long as my arm. So PEKK is a very, very unique molecule.”

A major gap that’s still impeding the penetration of additive manufacturing into major markets is the scarcity of functional materials suitable for production parts—that is, parts that go into finished products, as opposed to prototypes. Many of the polymer materials currently available—such as nylons, polyamides, and ABS—are inadequate for structural purposes, according to DeFe-lice, who said he sees “a lot of prototype and functional prototype business masquerading as additive manufacturing.” Buyers need to be disciplined, he said, about determining whether a service is really additive manufacturing, or just more of the same tech-nology that’s been available for the last 25 years. “That needs to be looked at closely when you evaluate the market, because the materials are huge,” he said. “You need materials that have much more functionality and capability.”

Another need is for improvements in the machines, which DeFelice said have been traditionally designed to make proto-types. “They have, inherent in them, a series of compromises—in controlling dimensions, controlling properties—that restrict their use for real production parts,” he said. “So there’s more to do on the machine side.”

As a company that serves the highly-regulated biomedical and aerospace industries, OPM has done the heavy lifting to put its own quality management systems in place. The company, certi-fied to ISO 13485, ISO 9001:2008, and AS9100 C standards, as well as cGMP and FDA requirements, also expects a high level of compliance from its own suppliers. “We’re really in the process of vigorously trying to educate suppliers and trying to educate partners so that they understand the standards that do exist and that they need to take seriously,” said DeFelice.

It takes a multi-disciplinary engineering team—on the side of the AM provider and on the customer’s side—to effectively implement an additive manufacturing solution into a company, DeFelice said. “You’ve got a lot of people making machines; you’ve got a lot of people from the prototype world who haven’t actu-ally implemented additive manufacturing solutions because they don’t have the technical breadth,” he said. “And that’s precisely how a small company, like OPM, has been able to position itself on the leading edge of orthopedics and on the leading edge of aerospace—because we have that multi-disciplinary, focused component development capability, using advanced materials, using additive manufacturing.”

DeFelice foresees a day when companies, such as GE, will have hundreds of parts that are additively manufactured. Ultimately, he believes, the technology for making these parts will no longer exist as separate and distinct from other manufacturing supply chains, but will be incorporated into them. To get there, however, requires the types of developments that many companies can’t facilitate on their own. “It requires a technical developer,” he said. “So I think what you’re going to see is, in the longer term, incorporation into traditional manufacturing supply chains, and—in parallel—advanced companies developing additive manufacturing solutions for their products and others.”

Will additive manufacturing ever replace traditional manu-facturing processes?

“It will replace certain traditional manufacturing processes,” DeFelice said. “If I look at the breakdown between penetration into existing manufacturing markets, versus what I would call ‘blue sky’ opportunities—the ability to create the thing that you could never create before, so it didn’t even exist as a manufac-tured item—there’s probably equal blue sky opportunity, if not more. I think there’s a lot of effort right now in trying to make the same thing a different way, and I think people look at the econom-ics of that and wonder why they bought their AM machine. It’s all about making a new thing a new way, and that’s a bigger climb.”

An Effective Way to Consolidate PartsAdditive manufacturing offers the ability to consolidate mul-

tiple parts, which had previously been assembled, into a single part or structure. Solid Concepts, an additive manufacturing, rapid prototyping, and custom manufacturing services provider based in Valencia, Calif., recently used FDM with Ultem to build mounting feature attachment fittings directly into an aircraft air duct, significantly reducing part count.

“Part count reduction ties into freedom of design because you can add features and complicate design without really add-ing cost,” said Chuck Alexander, product manager for additive manufacturing at Solid Concepts. “This was a large Ultem duct, and mounting bracketry was built along with the duct so that we didn’t have to attach the bracketry and then mount it from there, which adds not only part count, but assembly labor—and the cost to do that—as well. So if customers are looking at using additive manufacturing as a production method, we always encourage them to look for those part numbers that are in and around the parts that they’re looking to build. It could be simple things, like wire tie anchors or zip tie anchors. You can just build those on to the parts. Where you had to manufacture it in four, five, or six pieces before, you can combine them all together, realizing an even more substantial savings in time and money.”

Solid Concepts added a pair of EOS Direct Metal Laser Sinter-ing (DMLS) machines to its Austin, Tex., facility earlier this year in response to what the company said was a “clear demand from customers.” The company is currently using an EOS M270 for parts made of 17-4 stainless steel, and an EOS M280 to achieve faster production times for complex aerospace parts made of heat- and corrosion-resistant Inconel 625 and 718 metal alloys. Bringing the DMLS machines into its operations was a natural progression for Solid Concepts, which has always emphasized speed in meeting customers’ needs, according to Alexander.

Will additive manufacturing ever replacing traditional manu-facturing processes to any extent?

“I think so,” said Alexander. “It seems to me that consumer products, in general, are shorter and shorter life cycle, and the more you can customize them to the user, the more likely you are to sell to that customer. And I see that as a trend: Where you have shorter lifecycles, you have shorter runs of things, you have more customization, and that fits directly into additive manufacturing.”

A Complement to More Conventional Manufacturing Processes

Incodema Group, an Ithaca, N.Y.-based provider of rapid prototype services, added Direct Metal Laser Sintering (DMLS) to its offerings earlier this year. The new process complements

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a number of other additive manufacturing technologies offered by Incodema, including Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM), Selective Laser Sintering (SLS), and Stereolithography (SLA), as well as a range of traditional manufacturing processes that include sheet metal stamping, CNC machining, laser cutting, photochemical machining, EDM, and wire EDM.

“A lot of the geometries that people want made are very difficult to do with CNC, or with machining or castings, and then machining,” said Scott Volk, Incodema’s director of addi-tive manufacturing, metals. “DMLS offers a way to build a part with many of the tolerance requirements already built into the part. With minimal machining, you can then produce the same product that you would normally take weeks to produce by us-ing CNC. So it’s a way to offset a lot of the high lead times that happen within CNC.”

Incodema’s business development manager, James Hockey, said that additive manufacturing can build things that can’t be built any other way, and that’s what’s sparking the greatest interest in the technology. “It really is the way to design for function,” said Hockey. “Designers are able to now work their CAD, work their dreams, and there is a technology able to build it now, without the need to worry about designing for manufac-turing, designing around the limitations. You no longer have to worry about a complicated part being built in 10 different pieces because you can’t get it built any other way, taking 24 weeks or more to get in place. Now, you can redesign it to one

piece, and have a much better, much more highly designed and highly functional part.”

Volk was asked if he believed that additive manufacturing would ever replace traditional manufacturing processes, or if he saw it instead as something that would remain a complementary process.

“I believe it will be a complementary process,” said Volk. “I don’t ever see additive manufacturing actually ever replacing, completely, traditional methods, mostly because there are a lot of parts that are required—and many assemblies—where it would just never make sense to do that in additive manufacturing. There are just too many parts that are a perfect CNC part or a perfect casting, where CNC machining or casting are the proper methods to produce those parts. Unless you do something unique with it—like adding internal channels or creating some special feature within the part—there’s no reason to do that part in additive manufacturing. So because of those types of parts, I don’t think that additive manufacturing will replace traditional methods.

“On the other hand, another reason that it won’t is because I don’t really see it as a battle between the technologies. I think additive manufacturing is going to create more of a need for traditional [processes], and what I mean by that is CNC, EDM, and wire EDM. Additive manufacturing, and DMLS, specifically, needs all of those technologies to finish the part, so you still need them. And so I think the perfect word is ‘complementary.’ Both technologies are complementary of each other; it’s just choosing the proper process for every project.”