Essentium
Essentium
Blake Teipel spends an afternoon sat in front of the computer, stitching together a series of video clips in a bid to win over another engineer unaware, perhaps dubious, of the extent to which additive manufacturing can be applied.
“I know that additive is useful for prototyping,” he said, “but what else can be done?”
Even for someone as engaging a speaker as the Essentium CEO, Teipel was going to need more than just words to contextualise how additive could be useful beyond prototyping. Uploading onto his hard drive clips of bridge manufacturing applications, jigs and fixtures, and injection moulding tooling printed on the company’s High Speed Extrusion (HSE) platforms, he debated with himself which of the parts would make the best case for additive.
These parts are not usually shared and discussed over video, rather Essentium prefers to showcase them at additive manufacturing trade shows and conferences, where the Texas-based team would explain how they were printed in the high-performance materials available via its expanding portfolio. But instead of travelling north for AMUG and west for RAPID + TCT this spring, Teipel has found himself having these conversations over web conferencing platforms and other digital means. Meanwhile, when being asked what else can be done with additive, he was working with US governmental agencies to address equipment shortages amid the outbreak of COVID-19.
Back in normal times, the United States Air Force awarded Essentium a four-year contract to support the organisation’s maintenance, repair and overhaul operations; extending the life of its aircraft, helping to save on excessive costs when components need to be replaced, and supplying jigs, fixtures and service tools – ‘parts that touch planes but don’t fly’ – with more regularity. As winter turned to spring, much of that work was put on the backburner as together they began to figure out how best to leverage their additive manufacturing capacity to supply personal protective equipment (PPE) and medical components as demand spiked and supply dwindled.
It came as many factories throughout Asia ceased activity as widespread lockdowns were implemented, therefore slowing production and shipments, while other nations began to deploy an increased number of medical professionals to provide care, therefore using up more PPE more quickly. In the UK, for example, the supply of PPE is said to have been at times erratic, with boxes incorrectly labelled and many items rendered useless after failing performance tests.
It was emblematic of the mindset that was familiar with what additive used to be able to do.
Teipel, who has worked with his Essentium colleagues to develop a protective mask, which has gained FDA emergency use authorisation, comprising a reusable 3D printed mask frame and filtration media for the Pflugerville Police and Fire Departments, tells TCT the equipment shortages highlight the pitfalls of current supply chains.
“I think it does a shine a light on a lot of the challenges with classic just in time manufacturing, absolutely. It also shines a light on the challenge faced by the distance that we typically see between production and consumption,” he says. “Most of the world’s producing nations are in Asia and then most of the consuming nations are not only in Asian nations but the rest of the world. The geographic distance alone removes the ability for the supply chain to be agile. There’s a huge component of agility that’s baked into [the just in time] model, but when you’ve got distribution and a lot of physical distance also baked into the supply chain, it becomes quite challenging to have a just in time model really work.”
This, Teipel believes, is where 3D printing can come in. By installing equipment that is ‘highly flexible’, manufacturers can begin to defray some of these supply chain risks, perhaps by allowing parts to be produced locally, or by printing jigs, fixtures and tooling to keep factories operating at the scales they’re used to without prolonged lead times. It is these types of applications that Teipel puts to the visitors to his trade show stand, other industrial players who might be interested in the company’s HSE technology and his Air Force engineer friends.
These conversations are the source of much constructive feedback for Essentium. It is talking to the Air Force, for example, that has led Essentium to work more intently on the validation of ULTEM 9085 on its HSE printers – Essentium is also working with other SABIC resins, including ULTEM 1010, as well as ABS and Polycarbonate – while an ‘automotive pull’ was what inclined the company to harness LEHVOSS resins to develop the four materials announced at Formnext.
Supplementing the direct conversations, Essentium has with manufacturers, is a sponsored survey that this year garnered 162 participants, all of which were managers and executives from large manufacturing companies across the world. The response to this survey, a sequel to one carried out in 2018, provides Essentium a more general overview of what users of additive manufacturing want, need and have already achieved, as well as the challenges of adopting and implementing the technology in the first place. It’s not as explicit as a specific request to supply a specific material to solve a specific problem, but it does ‘give some amazing insights into the thinking process’ of manufacturers.
From the most recent survey, Essentium came to reason that, in addition to designers and engineers expanding their knowledge of additive, the procurement and finance teams at many organisations need to acquire new skills to understand, and subsequently unlock, the benefits of additive manufacturing technology. Teipel, speaking again in the context of the COVID-19 response, explains.
“The true need that needs to be served to address the virus and the supply chain shortfalls the virus has caused is agile surge capacity. Procurement folks don’t know how to deal with that. They don’t yet know how to buy capacity. They know how to buy assets or how to buy components, but they don’t know how to buy capacity.”
Essentium again has to do some convincing, this time using some of the most contemporary applications to hand. Printing its own community face masks, for example, at 100% capacity on 35 HSE machines, 14,600 masks - each of which can all be reused up to 30 times - can be produced a month: the equivalent of 438,000 masks. A subsequent example, hypothesising that the N95 mask shortage was solved once China’s manufacturing industry was back up and running, is the shortage of ventilators as the virus continues to spread. Essentium calculates it can produce 100,000 ventilator valves a month on a fleet of HSE systems.
Read more:
- "We haven't sold PLA this year" - Industrial adoption driving Essentium's 3D printing materials roadmap
- Essentium launches four high-temperature filaments for High Speed Extrusion 3D printing platform at Formnext
- Essentium ramps up production of High Speed Extrusion 3D printing system
These aren’t even what Essentium considers to be the best use case of additive. That would be tooling to enable injection moulding machine shops to bypass their 12-week wait times and reach their scales more quickly. Around 1,000 of injection moulding tools could also be manufactured every month on a fleet of HSE machines, which would invariably lead to mass volumes of parts being manufactured with injection moulding in quicker fashion.
“That’s the kind of use case study work that I have to do to help the procurement folks in finance and accounting and supply base engineering wrap their minds around the concept that what they’re buying is capacity; in this case, surge capacity,” Teipel stresses, before conceding the difficulties Essentium has in normal times when urgency and transparency are less. “If it was a non-coronavirus case, companies don’t yet understand the production model for additive. ‘If I buy this asset, this piece of capital equipment, how much productivity per unit time can I get off this machine?’ They don’t yet know, because there’s not enough data yet that we can share. Most of our partners are still in stealth, so it’s challenging for us to share that data widely enough to let the procurement folks understand what’s really possible. That’s another aspect of that challenge that we’re seeing.”
And yet, the same survey would suggest the use of additive manufacturing is increasing at promising rates, particularly for manufacturing aids and tooling jigs (up from 60% in 2018 to 70% in 2019) and full-scale production parts (up from 21% to 40% in the same timeframe). This is another stat where Teipel can pull on recent COVID-influenced experiences to theorise on why such steep increases have happened in such a short period of time. In the first couple of months of 2020, Teipel noticed that many companies ‘pushed the pause button’ on their operations to ‘wait and see’ what the outbreak of COVID-19 would do to the global manufacturing industry. Essentium’s commercial sales were challenged by this change in approach, per Teipel, because of a slowdown in people following through on orders. But then:
“In the month of March, there was a broad awakening,” Teipel observes, “folks said, ‘gosh, I really do need to have a more stable supply chain,’ because the agility and the responsiveness of the classic supply chain structures are insufficient to not only match the demand created by the coronavirus outbreak but demand created by tariff wars and other things like that. So, I would be tempted to attribute the huge upswing in usage of industrial AM to a kind of rebuilding or restructuring of supply chain activity to some degree.”
The company is still in the process of analysing this data and learning about the rationales for the jumps from one year to the next and, therefore, Teipel is keen to stress this is not so much a claim as it is a theory. A theory that might have been swayed by the pandemic’s spelling out the need for supply chains to be rethought to some degree in recent months or perhaps many respondents were already overseeing transformation processes when the virus began to spread. A follow-up survey to be conducted later this year may help to fill in the gaps, while Essentium will be able to put a third data point on the graph and begin analysing early trends.
That third data point will be an interesting indicator, when it comes, to the impact the pandemic has had on the application and perception of additive manufacturing technology. It’s already had a significant impact on the industry, with CONTEXT projecting 2020 to be a difficult year for printer sales and shipments and several trade shows wiped from the calendar, one of which ought to have seen the formal launch of two Essentium materials, ULTEM AM9085F and an ABS grade.
There is the conversation Teipel and his team expected to be having in Chicago and Anaheim at AMUG and RAPID + TCT in March and April, among the best places for Essentium to be pulled in a preferred direction by its target industries, to discuss the potential of the technology and to convince the doubters.
Those who doubt and those who are simply unaware are still widespread. In Essentium’s 2019 survey, 38% of participants noted mindset as something that needs to change within their organisation to scale the production of 3D printed parts. Among the many challenges facing the implementation of additive, it is perhaps the first which needs to be overcome. The way to do that is through real-life applications, and while Teipel won’t be stood on a trade show booth full of the latest and greatest Essentium customers have come up with anytime soon, he still has his methods, as his Air Force colleague can attest.
“It blew him away. He was like, ‘I’ve never seen anything like that from AM’. [These applications] would not have been newsworthy to folks who are very used to AM, but it was emblematic of the mindset that was familiar with what additive used to be able to do and had put it into a box. In reality though, with the speed and productivity of our platform and by pursuing material that can be priced in a way that it offers a large cost save over an incumbent method, we believe that we can help folks have that new mindset, which can put additive into a lot of boxes and not just the classic prototyping one.”
