HP Global Innovation Summit: New users, applications, and thoughts on the future

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Pronounced as its most beautiful office, for decades HP has had a home in Barcelona. It has been here for 30 years, is the largest of its research and development sites outside of the United States, and the headquarters for its 3D printing business. With summer beckoning, HP hosted its annual EMEA Global Innovation Summit, inviting media and analysts, to show off a facility emboldened by the products and applications inside it. As a tour takes attendees deeper into Sant Cugat del Valles, the ambitions, the methods and the challenges all outlined, HP showcases how it’s going to happen, and to a degree, already does.

That ‘it’ is the company’s desire to see the latest technology be harnessed to digitally transform businesses and disrupt markets. The history of the company is laid out in detailed timelines across the walls of its Sant Cugat facility, serving as a constant encouragement to its workforce that inhabit HP’s Barcelona base, made up of 61 different nationalities, to ‘keep reinventing’. It is a motto that best surmises its approach to offering 3D printing technology as a viable method of volume manufacturing, and those that use it.

Within this space, HP is keen to reiterate it wouldn’t have launched a 3D printing system if it wasn’t capable of making a big impact, and also where it wants that impact to be made: the $12T manufacturing market. In recent months, it has announced a new and improved production system, as well as the 300/ 500 full colour prototyping platform which will begin shipping later this year. Within 24 months of Multi Jet Fusion’s (MJF) introduction, the company has received custom from a range of industry leaders, like Johnson and Johnson and Nike; multiple unit orders from the likes of Proto Labs, Forecast 3D and ZiggZagg; aligned with some of the largest chemical companies in the world, BASF, Evonik, Lubrizol, to name a few; and established a reseller network encompassing 65 partners. Around 3.5 million parts have been manufactured with the MJF process, 50% of them for end-use application.

In the Sant Cugat facility, the efficiency of HP’s MJF process is laid bare, engineers demonstrating how the build unit can be emptied of its 380 x 284 x 380 mm block of 180°C PA12 powder, placed in the processing station for cooling, while the build unit can be cleaned and put straight back to work. Meanwhile, the software that powers the machines updates the user with how many layers have been printed, and how many parts are complete. It also has thermal imaging capabilities, and on the occasions the user is filling the build area with numerous different parts, the software’s algorithms intuitively position the objects to ensure the most efficient build. These capabilities serving as pulls to the industry players who will have a big say in HP’s ambition to impact the $12T manufacturing market with its 3D printing technology.

“Until now, 3D printing was a means to deliver prototyping,” Ramon Pastor, HP’s Vice President and General Manager of 3D Printing, said at HP’s Global Innovation Summit. “The fact that half of our printers are used for final part manufacturing is awesome and a great indication that we are on the right path. Not only this, we have more than 50 materials partners already engaged with us, developing materials for our platform. We also have more than 65 channel partners and distributors, and 25 demo centres. We are really happy with the trajectory we are on.”

This trajectory is best framed in the context of the news HP had to share in Barcelona last week. While offering its successful history as a pointer to the fruitful future it strives for, in the present the company was celebrating the recent deployment of 21 MJF production machines between three of its customers, and a host of new applications using its 3D printing technology.

“You can move from central production to distributed production, you can move from generic products to customised products, move from mass production to on-demand production.”

Before he outlined these current developments, Pastor’s presentation during a plenary session took visitors back 300 years, more than half a dozen generations before William Hewlett and David Packard founded the HP business, to a time when craftsmen were exclusively responsible for every aspect of the development of a product, from initial idea to delivery.

“The artisan was the designer. The artisan was the producer. The artisan designs and produces products for his neighbours. There was a proximity relationship to design and produce products for neighbours, he didn’t have any stock, and did it for neighbours on a personalised [approach].”

Yet through the first and second industrial revolution, these roles were disassociated and done by two different people, two different teams, or two different organisations altogether. With the third revolution, the growth of the internet, the world was connected and allowed companies to disassociate the roles geographically too, taking advantage of regions where the costs of labour are low. But this approach brings with it some problems. Supply chains are rigid, inventory is costly, and transporting product from manufacturing base to the user results in significant fuel consumption.

As we enter a fourth industrial revolution, one based on digital manufacturing, this is set to change, and on-demand, customised production, is making a comeback. It demonstrates how dated methods can become contemporary ones with the right technology at hand. That on-demand, customised approach to manufacturing that served our ancestors is once again becoming relevant, as the industrial revolutions come full circle.

“At the end of Industry 4.0 is more than the digitisation of the manufacturing ecosystem,” Pastor said. “It is the conversion of different technologies into this new way of designing and producing. Technologies like artificial intelligence, robotics, big data, and obviously 3D printing, when you combine all this, you can really change how things are done. You can move from central production to distributed production, you can move from generic products to customised products, move from mass production to on-demand production.”

It is perhaps why Proto Labs, IAM 3D Hub and ZiggZagg have all made recent purchases, and why Sculpteo, FICEP S3, Crispin Orthotics and Stern 3D have been able to successfully apply the MJF process in a variety of different products.

“This machine took five years to design and as soon as we made the decision to buy the HP printer, it was redesigned in less than two months.”

Proto Labs, a manufacturer of custom prototypes and on-demand production parts, has upgraded its seven 4200 machines, installed in the U.S. and Europe, to the new 4210 systems to meet the growing demand for 3D printed parts. A notable customer of Proto Labs is PepsiCo who, teaming up with Marvel Studios, developed a limited-edition set of promotional beverage kits for the release of Black Panther. ZiggZagg has installed six 4210 systems to cater for its customers in the medical, consumer goods, automotive and industrial markets. The service provider was represented by CEO, Stijn Paridaens, who brought with him an engine manifold for a racecar, printed in one piece with the MJF process after being reverse engineered and redesigned slightly. When injection moulded, the manifold consists of two pieces welded together, and as demonstrated by its tendency to blow out mid-race, wasn’t as durable as its 3D printed counterpart which has helped propel a Belgian race team finish races in the top five places, rather than prematurely due to technical faults. IAM 3D Hub, a Barcelona-based organisation helping companies transition into digital manufacturing, has installed eight 4200 platforms, while Materialise also boasts eight 4200 machines, which will help the company additively manufacture customised insoles designed off the back of data captured by the FitStation powered by HP.

Other applications include custom designed helmets for the Pontifical Swiss Guard, which are much lighter than the original designs; a bike helmet, also lighter, by 20%, printed by Sculpteo; Crispin Orthotics use MJF for ankle foot orthoses; and Stern 3D is manufacturing robotic gripper and mounting fixtures with its 10 MJF systems.

It didn’t stop there. Attendees were welcomed into a room full to the brim of parts printed with the HP process. A series of tools were on display, including a drill extraction shoe, an instrument used in the production line for HP printheads. With 3D printing, cost per part is down from €360 to €18, and the weight has come down from 575g to 42.4g. Another part featured here was a battery cooling system for a Formula racing car, which consists of three 3D printed parts attached with high precision clipping mechanisms. It is said to resist vibrations and small energy impacts during a race, and thanks to its customised geometry, prevents small particles passing to the batteries through the duct, and therefore prevents electrical damage.

Among the most interesting applications, and one of the most successful implementations of MJF on display, was an arm of FICEP S3’s Da Vinci Painting Machine. FICEP is an industrial machinery supplier and has worked on such projects as The Shard in London, and the Freedom Tower in New York. The Da Vinci Painting Machine is used to paint structural steel after it has been cleaned with a shot blast machine, helping to protect against rust and guarantee the of the quality of the finish. Around 40% of the machine is 3D printed, including the wheels, the pulleys, the axles, but most importantly the four arms. Typically, machines of this type only have two painting arms, but FICEP has been able to double up because of the concise design MJF has enabled. Bringing on board HP’s 3D printing technology has not only compacted the size of the design, but also the time it took to generate. As attendees broke off for one-to-one meeting with HP and its customers, Nuno Neves, Director, FICEP S3, put the benefits of MJF into context.

“This machine took five years to design and as soon as we made the decision to buy the HP printer, it was redesigned in less than two months,” Neves told TCT. It then went from a design Neves did on a train to a solid part in less than 72 hours. And as well as time-saving: “The advantages of [Multi Jet Fusion], it’s a heavy part, but to do it traditionally it’s a lot heavier. We’re able to accelerate and stop quicker, for safety and for position that’s really important. Another advantage that this gives us is, aesthetically, we’re able to control the angles of the tubes so we can control air flow. There’s no kinks, no wire ties, also the parts end up so light we’re able to reduce the size of the motors and the server controllers that we use for the entire system.

“You can’t do this any other way.”

“The digital transformation of the $12 trillion manufacturing industry is changing the game for the world’s designers, product developers, manufacturing and supply chain professionals, creating massive opportunity for the 3D printing ecosystem,” commented Pastor in a company press release, though as if directly addressing FICEP, et al. “In collaboration with our customers, we are proud to reinvent the way the world designs and manufactures and to drive innovative new applications made possible with HP Multi Jet Fusion.”

“It’s frequently said that if we took our manufacturing as we currently make products today, and we kept doing it in the same way, just to satisfy the 8.6 billion people that will be living on the planet, living in highly dense cities, we would need two earths in order to sustain that process.”

That present endeavour brings much promise. In ten years time, HP Inc is expecting the 3D printing division to make up a ‘a very substantial’ part of the business. The company’s investments in the field of 3D printing has come as a direct result of how it projects the future panning out. Cities are expanding, the population is growing, people are living longer, and the demand for products is ever-increasing, putting stress on manufacturing workflows. HP imagines a future of blended reality, bringing people and technology, the physical and digital, and intertwining it in a seamless way to produce effective results. HP’s Sustainability and Impact team has done a lot of research on this and continues to do so year on year. The company, annually, convenes to fine-tune its approach on the back of these studies. Perhaps the most striking finding thus far, and one which drives its digital transformation ambitions with contemporary technologies, is this:

“It’s frequently said,” Shane Wall, HP CTO and Head of HP Labs, begins, “that if we took our manufacturing as we currently make products today, and we kept doing it in the same way, just to satisfy the 8.6 billion people that will be living on the planet [by 2030] living in highly dense cities, we would need two earths in order to sustain that process. Clearly not sustainable, so we need to take a different approach about how we design products, and how we market them, and about sustainability as well.”

“This was the reason that HP entered the 3D printing world, inventing Multi Jet Fusion,” Pastor said. “Multi Jet Fusion technology really provides answers to these factors that we are studying. With the breakthrough of productivity, measuring the number of parts you can do in the machine in a week, in a year, this is by far the most productive system today in the market. Producing quality parts at a fraction of the cost.

“Not only are we doing this but actually we have opened a new platform of innovation for materials. An open material platform can provide all the material that companies in the world, all the chemists of the world, to innovate on top of our platforms and, therefore, getting to cost and getting to breadth of materials. And we are doing this, not alone, but involving the key leaders on each vertical, and the leaders on the whole end-to-end ecosystem, from design CAD vendors to post processing companies.”

HP recognises, too, that its role doesn’t stop at being a developer, provider and champion of these technologies, and so its HP Life program offers, at the time of writing, 29 educational packages. A Q&A session provides Nate Hurst, Chief Sustainability & Social Impact, HP, to detail what this online scheme entails. It helps users build skills and prepare them for digital transformation. It’s a free platform, available in seven languages, and helps people get to grips with finance; marketing; communication; and start-ups and innovation. One of the most recent additions to this program centres on product design, including for 3D printing.

“We embrace that we need to prepare the communities in which we live and work for this transformation,” explained Hurst. “It’s important that we invest in the communities and be inclusive. That’s why it is free. We’re trying to bring all populations, even those that are underserved and under-represented, into this new age and grow with us in a responsible way.”

As HP's Global Innovation Summit drew to a close, after multiple presentations, a customer panel session, a tour of the labs, a roundtable meeting with analysts, and one-to-one interviews with the media, HP's all-encompassing approach was spelled out. In the two years since HP launched its flagship 3D printing platform, the company has already achieved reasonable success. But they, like all companies, can't stand still. Shane Wall said 'ideas move at the speed of light' and if companies can't deal with that, they will go extinct. HP believes its products and methods alike can ensure that doesn't happen, for them and for others too. 

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