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Mapping out the additive manufacturing landscape
Metal Powder Report Volume 00, Number 00 January 2015
SPECIAL FEATURE
metal-powder.net
Mapping out the additive manufacturing landscape Stewart Bland and Brett Conner There’s no denying that additive manufacturing is receiving an enormous and increasing amount of interest from industry and academia alike. But how can companies navigate their way around this emerging landscape? Metal Powder Report spoke to Dr Brett Conner, lead author of new study in the journal Additive Manufacturing that introduces a system to map out potential products and help businesses make informed decisions. Dr Brett Conner is a Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Youngstown State University (YSU), Youngstown, Ohio, and lead author of the paper Making sense of 3-D printing: Creating a map of additive manufacturing products and services [1]. Located in the middle of America’s Rust Belt, Youngstown is now the home of America Makes, the national additive and manufacturing innovation institute. As a result, Youngstown State University has established a Center of Innovation, of which Dr Conner’s research group is a part. In turn, the Center benefits from YSUs, strong materials characterization capabilities, to develop new materials, and conduct materials process development for additive manufacturing.
Dr Conner, can you tell us about your work at the Centre and YSU?
E-mail address: [email protected].
We look into applications of additive manufacturing that is enabled by digital design and manufacturing. We are interested in the digital thread behind additive manufacturing that allows us to make new products that we have not been able to make before. We also have a strong emphasis area in precision post-processing of metal parts. Just because you are done printing the part using additive manufacturing, it does not mean that is the last step, so we look at precision post-processing, including subtractive methods and heat treatments and metrology. We also work on innovative business strategies and approaches, and entrepreneurship enabled by additive manufacturing, or 3D printing. So we have got a broad role at the Center: primarily materials-related, but now we also have a business piece as well.
0026-0657/ß 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.mprp.2014.12.052
1 Please cite this article in press as: S. Bland, B. Conner, Met. Powder Rep. (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.mprp.2014.12.052
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Metal Powder Report Volume 00, Number 00 January 2015
SPECIAL FEATURE
You’ve recently reported on creating a map of additive manufacturing products and services in the journal, Additive Manufacturing [1]. Now, why do we need to be able to map out the 3D printing landscape? People use maps to work out where they are and determine where they want to go, and so basically the map provides clarity. If we look at additive manufacturing (also called 3D printing), we see so much hype around it, and there are multiple 3D printing technologies. The ASTM (American Society for Testing and Materials) has seven different categories of added manufacturing technologies, and within each of those categories are various technologies from different vendors. We can also look at the product opportunities as well. In 3D printing, there are so many different opportunities: in aerospace, in defense, in medicine, in industrial products, consumer products, automotive. It can be quite confusing for any sort of entity trying to enter into this field, and so having a map of additive manufacturing products and services is going to be useful to business executives, to entrepreneurs and investors, engineers and product development teams, researchers, and even students.
How do you go about starting to map out manufactured products? Any type of a map requires a reference system, and here we are going to look at key attributes of manufacturing, and there are many attributes of manufactured products. But what we decided to do was focus on three main attributes. The first one is product complexity, and that could be a geometric complexity. You could look at a manufactured product, and recognize that that is a complex part geometrically. You could also increase complexity by incorporating multiple materials into that part. Complexity in general with conventional manufacturing tends to be expensive. The more complex something is, the more expensive it is to manufacture. Just taking geometric complexity alone, and looking at subtractive manufacturing, there will be more tool paths and potentially different types of tools, to be able to make a complex part. And that just means more costs, more time that the part is going to be in the milling machine or the product center – and that’s going to translate into more cost. Now, the second attribute that we looked at is customization, and here we define customization as the uniqueness of a product. So many products that we see, just considering consumer products alone, you find many products that are pretty much the same. But if we looked at customized products, we find low-hanging fruit there in terms of medical applications, for example, prosthetics or implants, those can be highly unique and tailored to just that individual. Again, with conventional manufacturing, customization generally involves increased cost. We’re either talking about large labor costs – touch time on that product, even hand-crafting – or a significant amount of time trying to set up equipment. So we have this mindset in terms of a customized product being a volume of one, but that is not the case, and so we’ll get into that a little bit later: that production volume and customization are not necessarily the same. But that leads us to the third attribute, which is production volume, which is the quantity of a given product being produced in a timeframe. If you take these three attributes, you can basically come up with a model that is three-dimensional – there are three axes: one for complexity, one for customization, and one
Three axis model of manufactured products. Reproduced from reference [1].
for production volume, and within those axes you can contain a cube with low and high regions of each attribute, and so that becomes our reference system that we can use to describe manufactured products, and specifically additively manufactured products.
Is it possible to break this 3D manufacturing space down any further? Sure; I mentioned this model has eight different regions in it, so let’s look at a few of these regions. Let’s first think about a region where we have low customization, low complexity, and high volume, and what that describes is traditional mass manufacturing, where we drive out complexity, and we basically eliminate customization, in order to reduce the cost for manufactured parts, and it becomes a cost-driven exercise. Sometimes we try to entice consumers by giving them a selection of pre-determined options chosen by the manufacturer, but it is still low customization. So how we conduct our product design is basically driven by cost, and so we talk about design for manufacturing and assembly. Now, if we look at low customization, low complexity, but low volume, that now brings us into a different region of manufacturing, again one that’s occupied by traditional manufacturing. However, this is the region where additive manufacturing was born. A prototype is essentially a low-volume product. Here a prototype will represent a product that’s going to be manufactured using conventional mass manufacturing processes, so the customisation and the complexity are going to be low – but it’s the region where additive manufacturing was born as rapid prototyping. For rapid manufacturing, instead of having to wait for tooling and fixturing to arrive, and instead of investing in tooling and fixturing, we can now manufacture using additive manufacturing. This is a region where additive manufacturing can potentially play a role, but has to compete against conventional manufacturing. It has to be cost-effective, and it has to be perhaps faster, and may
2 Please cite this article in press as: S. Bland, B. Conner, Met. Powder Rep. (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.mprp.2014.12.052
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mean dealing with products that are made of extensive materials – nickel-based super alloys, titanium and so forth: where conventional manufacturing is quite expensive. In this region additive manufacturing may have an opportunity here to reduce costs and reduce the time to manufacture. People are already comfortable with those regions of the model, because that’s traditional manufacturing, but let’s look at trying to increase complexity. Looking at an example where we have low volume manufacturing and no customization and high complexity. Why would anybody want to have a more complex product? It’s usually because we are trying to solve a problem: we could be trying to make something lighter in weight; it could be that we want to have a more efficient heat exchanger; it could be that we have a product that requires a great deal of aesthetics, something visual, perhaps related to artwork; or it could be something where the challenge is, right now, to make that complex part we have to make a bunch of simple parts, and then join them together. So if I can make it more complex, I could consolidate my parts from ten or twenty to one, and we’ve seen examples of these recently: for example GE Aviation, and the LEAP engine fuel nozzle, where we took a part that was originally twenty assembled parts, and consolidated them into one 3D-printed part, with a complex internal structure to enable more efficient fuel flow. We also see this, again with GE, for engine brackets, and Airbus, looking at brackets for aerospace structures, where they’ve taken conventional bracket designs and made a more complex geometry, only putting material where it’s needed in the structure for strength and for stiffness, and coming up with something lightweight. Now, let’s consider one other aspect here: customization. Customization is something that’s unique, and I am going to talk about high-volume customization, or mass customization. This is something that would be practically unthinkable using conventional manufacturing, because you wouldn’t really want to fabricate tool for each and every customized part, but it is possible to use 3D printing to do this, and an example of this is Invisalign braces, or invisible aligners to straighten teeth. Each one of those is highly customized, based on impressions and x-rays of the patient. The company that makes those components, creates 20 million a year. Now, the aligners themselves aren’t 3D-printed, they’re thermoformed plastic, but the tooling to make each and every one of those is 3D-printed using stereolithography. 20 million customized parts a year, mass customization – that’s very revolutionary. So those are just four out of the eight regions in the model, but it gives you a feel for how different additive manufacturing is from conventional manufacturing.
Is it possible to go beyond the qualitative description, and start quantitatively placing real products in this space? Yes it is, and that’s one of the key discussion points in our paper [1], and a key portion of this research. We were able to look at complexity, geometric complexity. We focused on that topic. We used models that we found in the literature for casting. Casting components are relatively complex, for conventional manufacturing methods. We found some models that were based on casting, and looked at things like the surface area of the part, the volume of the part, the bounding box of the part, and if it had other features that were casting-specific, we adapted them to look at aspects such
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Metal Powder Report Volume 00, Number 00 January 2015
Two families of parts where increasing complexity leads to reduced weight. Reproduced from Ref. [1].
as the number of holes in the part. For example, if you make a lattice structure, there are many open spaces inside the structure, but for additive manufacturing, it’s perfectly fine – we can go and print it that way. So we were able to modify this, and come up with a quantitative and continuous complexity factor, such that we could take products and look at them at a scale, and compare them to each other using a complexity factor. Now, onto the customization side, we didn’t have something that was continuous, but we were able to develop discreet levels of customization, so we could look at a product and assign it a level of customization. We came up with five different levels, ranging from something that is not customized, all the way to something that’s truly unique, but the key dividing point between what would be considered low customization and high customization is a situation where we have a product that includes one feature that is customized by the customer, and it’s not pre-determined by the manufacture. Now, I mentioned that in conventional manufacturing, manufacturers will try to give their customers some level of selection, but those are all pre-defined by the manufacturer, and they can arrange tooling and fixturing. But if we’re looking at features within that part itself, such as geometric features, that are determined by the customer – you can’t really prepare for that. But in 3D printing, you don’t have to prepare for that. You don’t have to have the tooling, you don’t have to have the fixturing in place – you can just print it, so we came up with discreet levels. So the combination allows us to be able to place a product within specific regions of the model, and have a more focused discussion.
Ultimately, what will mapping out parts and products allow us to achieve? I can think of four different opportunities that come out of this model. There are more, but four that I want to emphasize here. First of all is that we can allow businesses to determine which portion of their product portfolio is best suited to additive manufacturing. They can look at their existing product portfolio, be able to quantify the level of complexity, be able to determine 3
Please cite this article in press as: S. Bland, B. Conner, Met. Powder Rep. (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.mprp.2014.12.052
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the level of customization, and determine whether it makes sense to use additive manufacturing. We can also help businesses determine how to best optimize products for 3D printing: their current product portfolio may not be suitable for 3D printing, but if they were to, say, change the geometry of a product, much like we saw with the GE engine bracket, they can change the geometry of the product to make it lighter weight, or to have some sort of functionality that is enhanced by additive manufacturing. The model basically allows the company to think about how to optimize those products. It also allows us to rethink business models, so when we’re trying to emphasize complexity and customization, we have to rethink how we engage our customers. On the complexity side, we have to rethink the engagement between design engineers and manufacturing engineers, even if they are within the same company. Even if the company is vertical integrated, we still have to rethink the way that we bring those together, and rethink the design cycle into something that’s more iterative and more experimental, versus trying to keep everything virtual, and then sending it to a production center that’s far away. We can see greater unity between design and our manufacturing. Also, if we look at consumer products, we can think about how we’re going to engage customers from a customization standpoint. Now obviously, if you are making invisible braces, there is an existing customer engagement point through dentists’ offices, but if you’re trying to make something like a 3D-printed shoe, or you’re allowing the customer to change the color of the shoe and the shape and so forth, you need to think about how you are going to engage those customers, and the services that are required. There are other things too, like rethinking the supply chain – where are you going to put your manufacturing equipment? Instead of focusing on cost, where you were going to place the manufacturing location where you can have the lowest cost capital and infrastructure and labor – now you’re thinking about where the value proposition may be best, and move your manufacturing infrastructure closer to where the customer is. Lastly, I think that this model can help to guide research too, even materials research, because now we think about how research and additive manufacturing is going to affect and enable complexity, and how it is going to affect and enable customization, and then production volume. A lot of additive manufacturing processes are batch-based, and for many products, that’s good. But greater speeds, process times and cycle times can open up other product forms, where we can get into increasing mass customization with items that are larger than invisible braces, so there is a need to speed up the process.
Metal Powder Report Volume 00, Number 00 January 2015
A rotor and stator for oil & gas applications. The components were printed using the binder jetting process. The material is stainless steel 420 infiltrated with bronze. Courtesy, Brett Conner.
sense in our product portfolio? What are the new business opportunities? If they’re going to jump into this field without making a major investment, how can we enable that? So, we are trying to use this toolset in casting, looking at comparing the complexity factor, that continuous complexity factor, with product cost, and trying to look for that break-even point on this complexity factor, trying to look at the break-even point between conventional pattern-making for sand casting, versus 3D printing. So that is going on right now, and we hope to have more results within the next year, and implementation of this and this toolset in the metal casting industry. The other thing we are trying to do is perform more research on describing and quantifying customization. So we have a discreet scale for customization, but can we have a customization factor that’s continuous, a continuous function, just like we see with complexity? Also, what has to go behind customization on the services side? What is needed to be able to enable consumer customization, which could be quite disruptive to manufacturing? So those are a couple of the next steps in this project, and we’re hoping to see some fruit in both of those areas this year.
What’s the next step in the project? One thing that we are doing now, with funding from America Makes, and working with the Youngstown Business Incubator, the American Foundry Society, the University of Northern Iowa, and several small/medium business partners, and a 3D printer company - we are looking at implementing this within the US metal casting industry. Many businesses in that industry are small businesses that are involved in sand casting, and we can use 3D printing and sand to be able to make the molds and the cores. The challenge is for small and medium business executives, is the cost of trying to acquire the capital, but also, where does this make
An ExOne M-Flex binder jetting printer. Courtesy, Brett Conner.
4 Please cite this article in press as: S. Bland, B. Conner, Met. Powder Rep. (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.mprp.2014.12.052
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Finally, what are the other hot topics in additive manufacturing right now? I think one area is developing new materials designed specifically for additive processes. If you look at additive manufacturing today, take metals, for example. A lot of the materials that are being used are materials that are well-known on the conventional manufacturing side. For example in titanium, Ti 6-4 is a common material for additive manufacturing, but it was never really designed for a laser-based, or an electron-beam-based, energy process. Could we develop an alloy of titanium that is well-suited for the rapid solidification that we see in additive manufacturing? And I think that that example can be extended to other alloy families as well, and arguably on the polymer side. Now, on polymers, a lot of work concerns looking at new additives and fillers that could give the desired properties. That’s really an area focused on the polymer side, but for metals I think that there’s a great opportunity for alloy development and various metal systems, that will really take advantage of these processes. When I worked in the aluminium industry, we had alloys that were developed for quench-insensitivity for thick plate products, or developed to get a strength boost during a tempering process. So those were alloys specifically tailored for manufacturing processes, and we have not really seen that yet in additive manufacturing, and I think that that’s a ripe field for research.
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The other area that I’m very much interested in, and our research group is pursuing, is using additive manufacturing to fabricate multi-material structures, for example, functional-graded materials, or even multi-functional structures. There are technologies that exist now, for metals and ceramics, and also polymers as well, where you can select where, in a given structure, you want a certain material. So you could think about properties within a structure, and maybe emphasize stiffness in one area and flexibility in another area. Historically we have done that through manufacturing processes like roll bonding for alclad alloys, or if we look in the polymer side, over-molding, but now we have the ability to, during the manufacturing process itself, to place materials in a location that would be absolutely impossible to do using conventional means. And this requires a great change in thinking from the design standpoint, but there are also tremendous opportunities on the materials side as well, especially for functionally-graded materials. So those two areas: new materials development and multi-materials, I think these are the hot topics in the materials science of additive manufacturing. Reference 1 B.P. Conner, et al., Making sense of 3-D printing: creating a map of additive manufacturing products and services, Addit. Manuf. (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10. 1016/j.addma.2014.08.005.
5 Please cite this article in press as: S. Bland, B. Conner, Met. Powder Rep. (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.mprp.2014.12.052
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Metal Powder Report Volume 00, Number 00 January 2015
SPECIAL FEATURE
metal-powder.net
Mapping out the additive manufacturing landscape Stewart Bland and Brett Conner There’s no denying that additive manufacturing is receiving an enormous and increasing amount of interest from industry and academia alike. But how can companies navigate their way around this emerging landscape? Metal Powder Report spoke to Dr Brett Conner, lead author of new study in the journal Additive Manufacturing that introduces a system to map out potential products and help businesses make informed decisions. Dr Brett Conner is a Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Youngstown State University (YSU), Youngstown, Ohio, and lead author of the paper Making sense of 3-D printing: Creating a map of additive manufacturing products and services [1]. Located in the middle of America’s Rust Belt, Youngstown is now the home of America Makes, the national additive and manufacturing innovation institute. As a result, Youngstown State University has established a Center of Innovation, of which Dr Conner’s research group is a part. In turn, the Center benefits from YSUs, strong materials characterization capabilities, to develop new materials, and conduct materials process development for additive manufacturing.
Dr Conner, can you tell us about your work at the Centre and YSU?
E-mail address: [email protected].
We look into applications of additive manufacturing that is enabled by digital design and manufacturing. We are interested in the digital thread behind additive manufacturing that allows us to make new products that we have not been able to make before. We also have a strong emphasis area in precision post-processing of metal parts. Just because you are done printing the part using additive manufacturing, it does not mean that is the last step, so we look at precision post-processing, including subtractive methods and heat treatments and metrology. We also work on innovative business strategies and approaches, and entrepreneurship enabled by additive manufacturing, or 3D printing. So we have got a broad role at the Center: primarily materials-related, but now we also have a business piece as well.
0026-0657/ß 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.mprp.2014.12.052
1 Please cite this article in press as: S. Bland, B. Conner, Met. Powder Rep. (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.mprp.2014.12.052
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Metal Powder Report Volume 00, Number 00 January 2015
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You’ve recently reported on creating a map of additive manufacturing products and services in the journal, Additive Manufacturing [1]. Now, why do we need to be able to map out the 3D printing landscape? People use maps to work out where they are and determine where they want to go, and so basically the map provides clarity. If we look at additive manufacturing (also called 3D printing), we see so much hype around it, and there are multiple 3D printing technologies. The ASTM (American Society for Testing and Materials) has seven different categories of added manufacturing technologies, and within each of those categories are various technologies from different vendors. We can also look at the product opportunities as well. In 3D printing, there are so many different opportunities: in aerospace, in defense, in medicine, in industrial products, consumer products, automotive. It can be quite confusing for any sort of entity trying to enter into this field, and so having a map of additive manufacturing products and services is going to be useful to business executives, to entrepreneurs and investors, engineers and product development teams, researchers, and even students.
How do you go about starting to map out manufactured products? Any type of a map requires a reference system, and here we are going to look at key attributes of manufacturing, and there are many attributes of manufactured products. But what we decided to do was focus on three main attributes. The first one is product complexity, and that could be a geometric complexity. You could look at a manufactured product, and recognize that that is a complex part geometrically. You could also increase complexity by incorporating multiple materials into that part. Complexity in general with conventional manufacturing tends to be expensive. The more complex something is, the more expensive it is to manufacture. Just taking geometric complexity alone, and looking at subtractive manufacturing, there will be more tool paths and potentially different types of tools, to be able to make a complex part. And that just means more costs, more time that the part is going to be in the milling machine or the product center – and that’s going to translate into more cost. Now, the second attribute that we looked at is customization, and here we define customization as the uniqueness of a product. So many products that we see, just considering consumer products alone, you find many products that are pretty much the same. But if we looked at customized products, we find low-hanging fruit there in terms of medical applications, for example, prosthetics or implants, those can be highly unique and tailored to just that individual. Again, with conventional manufacturing, customization generally involves increased cost. We’re either talking about large labor costs – touch time on that product, even hand-crafting – or a significant amount of time trying to set up equipment. So we have this mindset in terms of a customized product being a volume of one, but that is not the case, and so we’ll get into that a little bit later: that production volume and customization are not necessarily the same. But that leads us to the third attribute, which is production volume, which is the quantity of a given product being produced in a timeframe. If you take these three attributes, you can basically come up with a model that is three-dimensional – there are three axes: one for complexity, one for customization, and one
Three axis model of manufactured products. Reproduced from reference [1].
for production volume, and within those axes you can contain a cube with low and high regions of each attribute, and so that becomes our reference system that we can use to describe manufactured products, and specifically additively manufactured products.
Is it possible to break this 3D manufacturing space down any further? Sure; I mentioned this model has eight different regions in it, so let’s look at a few of these regions. Let’s first think about a region where we have low customization, low complexity, and high volume, and what that describes is traditional mass manufacturing, where we drive out complexity, and we basically eliminate customization, in order to reduce the cost for manufactured parts, and it becomes a cost-driven exercise. Sometimes we try to entice consumers by giving them a selection of pre-determined options chosen by the manufacturer, but it is still low customization. So how we conduct our product design is basically driven by cost, and so we talk about design for manufacturing and assembly. Now, if we look at low customization, low complexity, but low volume, that now brings us into a different region of manufacturing, again one that’s occupied by traditional manufacturing. However, this is the region where additive manufacturing was born. A prototype is essentially a low-volume product. Here a prototype will represent a product that’s going to be manufactured using conventional mass manufacturing processes, so the customisation and the complexity are going to be low – but it’s the region where additive manufacturing was born as rapid prototyping. For rapid manufacturing, instead of having to wait for tooling and fixturing to arrive, and instead of investing in tooling and fixturing, we can now manufacture using additive manufacturing. This is a region where additive manufacturing can potentially play a role, but has to compete against conventional manufacturing. It has to be cost-effective, and it has to be perhaps faster, and may
2 Please cite this article in press as: S. Bland, B. Conner, Met. Powder Rep. (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.mprp.2014.12.052
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mean dealing with products that are made of extensive materials – nickel-based super alloys, titanium and so forth: where conventional manufacturing is quite expensive. In this region additive manufacturing may have an opportunity here to reduce costs and reduce the time to manufacture. People are already comfortable with those regions of the model, because that’s traditional manufacturing, but let’s look at trying to increase complexity. Looking at an example where we have low volume manufacturing and no customization and high complexity. Why would anybody want to have a more complex product? It’s usually because we are trying to solve a problem: we could be trying to make something lighter in weight; it could be that we want to have a more efficient heat exchanger; it could be that we have a product that requires a great deal of aesthetics, something visual, perhaps related to artwork; or it could be something where the challenge is, right now, to make that complex part we have to make a bunch of simple parts, and then join them together. So if I can make it more complex, I could consolidate my parts from ten or twenty to one, and we’ve seen examples of these recently: for example GE Aviation, and the LEAP engine fuel nozzle, where we took a part that was originally twenty assembled parts, and consolidated them into one 3D-printed part, with a complex internal structure to enable more efficient fuel flow. We also see this, again with GE, for engine brackets, and Airbus, looking at brackets for aerospace structures, where they’ve taken conventional bracket designs and made a more complex geometry, only putting material where it’s needed in the structure for strength and for stiffness, and coming up with something lightweight. Now, let’s consider one other aspect here: customization. Customization is something that’s unique, and I am going to talk about high-volume customization, or mass customization. This is something that would be practically unthinkable using conventional manufacturing, because you wouldn’t really want to fabricate tool for each and every customized part, but it is possible to use 3D printing to do this, and an example of this is Invisalign braces, or invisible aligners to straighten teeth. Each one of those is highly customized, based on impressions and x-rays of the patient. The company that makes those components, creates 20 million a year. Now, the aligners themselves aren’t 3D-printed, they’re thermoformed plastic, but the tooling to make each and every one of those is 3D-printed using stereolithography. 20 million customized parts a year, mass customization – that’s very revolutionary. So those are just four out of the eight regions in the model, but it gives you a feel for how different additive manufacturing is from conventional manufacturing.
Is it possible to go beyond the qualitative description, and start quantitatively placing real products in this space? Yes it is, and that’s one of the key discussion points in our paper [1], and a key portion of this research. We were able to look at complexity, geometric complexity. We focused on that topic. We used models that we found in the literature for casting. Casting components are relatively complex, for conventional manufacturing methods. We found some models that were based on casting, and looked at things like the surface area of the part, the volume of the part, the bounding box of the part, and if it had other features that were casting-specific, we adapted them to look at aspects such
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Metal Powder Report Volume 00, Number 00 January 2015
Two families of parts where increasing complexity leads to reduced weight. Reproduced from Ref. [1].
as the number of holes in the part. For example, if you make a lattice structure, there are many open spaces inside the structure, but for additive manufacturing, it’s perfectly fine – we can go and print it that way. So we were able to modify this, and come up with a quantitative and continuous complexity factor, such that we could take products and look at them at a scale, and compare them to each other using a complexity factor. Now, onto the customization side, we didn’t have something that was continuous, but we were able to develop discreet levels of customization, so we could look at a product and assign it a level of customization. We came up with five different levels, ranging from something that is not customized, all the way to something that’s truly unique, but the key dividing point between what would be considered low customization and high customization is a situation where we have a product that includes one feature that is customized by the customer, and it’s not pre-determined by the manufacture. Now, I mentioned that in conventional manufacturing, manufacturers will try to give their customers some level of selection, but those are all pre-defined by the manufacturer, and they can arrange tooling and fixturing. But if we’re looking at features within that part itself, such as geometric features, that are determined by the customer – you can’t really prepare for that. But in 3D printing, you don’t have to prepare for that. You don’t have to have the tooling, you don’t have to have the fixturing in place – you can just print it, so we came up with discreet levels. So the combination allows us to be able to place a product within specific regions of the model, and have a more focused discussion.
Ultimately, what will mapping out parts and products allow us to achieve? I can think of four different opportunities that come out of this model. There are more, but four that I want to emphasize here. First of all is that we can allow businesses to determine which portion of their product portfolio is best suited to additive manufacturing. They can look at their existing product portfolio, be able to quantify the level of complexity, be able to determine 3
Please cite this article in press as: S. Bland, B. Conner, Met. Powder Rep. (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.mprp.2014.12.052
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the level of customization, and determine whether it makes sense to use additive manufacturing. We can also help businesses determine how to best optimize products for 3D printing: their current product portfolio may not be suitable for 3D printing, but if they were to, say, change the geometry of a product, much like we saw with the GE engine bracket, they can change the geometry of the product to make it lighter weight, or to have some sort of functionality that is enhanced by additive manufacturing. The model basically allows the company to think about how to optimize those products. It also allows us to rethink business models, so when we’re trying to emphasize complexity and customization, we have to rethink how we engage our customers. On the complexity side, we have to rethink the engagement between design engineers and manufacturing engineers, even if they are within the same company. Even if the company is vertical integrated, we still have to rethink the way that we bring those together, and rethink the design cycle into something that’s more iterative and more experimental, versus trying to keep everything virtual, and then sending it to a production center that’s far away. We can see greater unity between design and our manufacturing. Also, if we look at consumer products, we can think about how we’re going to engage customers from a customization standpoint. Now obviously, if you are making invisible braces, there is an existing customer engagement point through dentists’ offices, but if you’re trying to make something like a 3D-printed shoe, or you’re allowing the customer to change the color of the shoe and the shape and so forth, you need to think about how you are going to engage those customers, and the services that are required. There are other things too, like rethinking the supply chain – where are you going to put your manufacturing equipment? Instead of focusing on cost, where you were going to place the manufacturing location where you can have the lowest cost capital and infrastructure and labor – now you’re thinking about where the value proposition may be best, and move your manufacturing infrastructure closer to where the customer is. Lastly, I think that this model can help to guide research too, even materials research, because now we think about how research and additive manufacturing is going to affect and enable complexity, and how it is going to affect and enable customization, and then production volume. A lot of additive manufacturing processes are batch-based, and for many products, that’s good. But greater speeds, process times and cycle times can open up other product forms, where we can get into increasing mass customization with items that are larger than invisible braces, so there is a need to speed up the process.
Metal Powder Report Volume 00, Number 00 January 2015
A rotor and stator for oil & gas applications. The components were printed using the binder jetting process. The material is stainless steel 420 infiltrated with bronze. Courtesy, Brett Conner.
sense in our product portfolio? What are the new business opportunities? If they’re going to jump into this field without making a major investment, how can we enable that? So, we are trying to use this toolset in casting, looking at comparing the complexity factor, that continuous complexity factor, with product cost, and trying to look for that break-even point on this complexity factor, trying to look at the break-even point between conventional pattern-making for sand casting, versus 3D printing. So that is going on right now, and we hope to have more results within the next year, and implementation of this and this toolset in the metal casting industry. The other thing we are trying to do is perform more research on describing and quantifying customization. So we have a discreet scale for customization, but can we have a customization factor that’s continuous, a continuous function, just like we see with complexity? Also, what has to go behind customization on the services side? What is needed to be able to enable consumer customization, which could be quite disruptive to manufacturing? So those are a couple of the next steps in this project, and we’re hoping to see some fruit in both of those areas this year.
What’s the next step in the project? One thing that we are doing now, with funding from America Makes, and working with the Youngstown Business Incubator, the American Foundry Society, the University of Northern Iowa, and several small/medium business partners, and a 3D printer company - we are looking at implementing this within the US metal casting industry. Many businesses in that industry are small businesses that are involved in sand casting, and we can use 3D printing and sand to be able to make the molds and the cores. The challenge is for small and medium business executives, is the cost of trying to acquire the capital, but also, where does this make
An ExOne M-Flex binder jetting printer. Courtesy, Brett Conner.
4 Please cite this article in press as: S. Bland, B. Conner, Met. Powder Rep. (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.mprp.2014.12.052
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Finally, what are the other hot topics in additive manufacturing right now? I think one area is developing new materials designed specifically for additive processes. If you look at additive manufacturing today, take metals, for example. A lot of the materials that are being used are materials that are well-known on the conventional manufacturing side. For example in titanium, Ti 6-4 is a common material for additive manufacturing, but it was never really designed for a laser-based, or an electron-beam-based, energy process. Could we develop an alloy of titanium that is well-suited for the rapid solidification that we see in additive manufacturing? And I think that that example can be extended to other alloy families as well, and arguably on the polymer side. Now, on polymers, a lot of work concerns looking at new additives and fillers that could give the desired properties. That’s really an area focused on the polymer side, but for metals I think that there’s a great opportunity for alloy development and various metal systems, that will really take advantage of these processes. When I worked in the aluminium industry, we had alloys that were developed for quench-insensitivity for thick plate products, or developed to get a strength boost during a tempering process. So those were alloys specifically tailored for manufacturing processes, and we have not really seen that yet in additive manufacturing, and I think that that’s a ripe field for research.
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The other area that I’m very much interested in, and our research group is pursuing, is using additive manufacturing to fabricate multi-material structures, for example, functional-graded materials, or even multi-functional structures. There are technologies that exist now, for metals and ceramics, and also polymers as well, where you can select where, in a given structure, you want a certain material. So you could think about properties within a structure, and maybe emphasize stiffness in one area and flexibility in another area. Historically we have done that through manufacturing processes like roll bonding for alclad alloys, or if we look in the polymer side, over-molding, but now we have the ability to, during the manufacturing process itself, to place materials in a location that would be absolutely impossible to do using conventional means. And this requires a great change in thinking from the design standpoint, but there are also tremendous opportunities on the materials side as well, especially for functionally-graded materials. So those two areas: new materials development and multi-materials, I think these are the hot topics in the materials science of additive manufacturing. Reference 1 B.P. Conner, et al., Making sense of 3-D printing: creating a map of additive manufacturing products and services, Addit. Manuf. (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10. 1016/j.addma.2014.08.005.
5 Please cite this article in press as: S. Bland, B. Conner, Met. Powder Rep. (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.mprp.2014.12.052
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Metal Powder Report Volume 00, Number 00 January 2015