Ceramic gears produced with Freeform Injection Molding.
Walk the floor at an additive manufacturing trade show and one will find companies pitching their solutions for the design and prototyping of a product, the manufacture and measurement of the parts, and everything in between.
What happens in between often requires a lot of thought, even more action, and more time than anybody would like to spend. It’s likely that prototypes are 3D printed in one material and the subsequent end-use components injection moulded or machined in another.
"That is a risky process because it entails new validations, it entails new materials, it entails extra time, extra costs,” Lasse G Staal, Co-founder and CEO of AddiFab, said for possibly the umpteenth time on the third afternoon of TCT Show.
AddiFab is a company positioning itself in the in-between, hoping to relieve manufactures of the above considerations: “I see a gap between the prototyping and production that is not really being remedied by many 3D printing solutions,” Stall emphasised. The company has brought to market Freeform Injection Molding (FIM) and a portfolio of open digital light processing (DLP) 3D printers promising high precision and high repeatability for the additive manufacture of advanced single-use moulds with proprietary tooling resins.
These moulds are then placed in an injection moulding machine – AddiFab exhibited alongside a Babyplast system at TCT Show – where a material will be pressed into the mould’s cavity. The mould is then dissolved, inlets and outlets trimmed away, and the final part revealed. Because AddiFab only expects the printed moulds to last one shot, the company says it can process thousands of high-performance injection moulding materials – from flame retardant ABS grades to ultra-soft TPEs to carbon- reinforced PPA injection moulded at 350°C – and enable users to validate their components before scaling to thousands of parts with the same material and the same technology.
In Birmingham, UK in September, AddiFab pitched this to hordes of visitors who, at times, waited up to 20 minutes to learn about FIM. Talking to TCT - just the ten-minute wait for us - Staal revealed the motivation behind the company’s cross over between additive manufacturing and injection moulding.
Double helix sample part.
“We’ve tried to create a platform that combines the benefits from 3D printing with injection moulding, so you get the same low start-up costs, short lead times and design freedom, but the baseline is injection moulding. That means we can process all the materials that an injection moulding user would normally want to process: all those pre-qualified grades for the automotive industries, all the pre-qualified grades for the aerospace industries, the stuff you use for medical devices, which also have to be biocompatible. Most of those materials are not available as 3D printable materials, but FIM allows us to process them off the shelf.”
These materials are the kind to feature on approved lists inside factories in the aerospace, automotive, and medical industries. There are similar documents at Danfoss, a company currently testing FIM, which include grades such as PEEK and 40% glass-filled PPS, the former of which is notoriously not the easiest to 3D print, and the latter of which is barely 3D printable at all. It means that Danfoss is rarely able to 3D print prototypes of parts in the same materials it intends to use when it steps into production.
AddiFab believes FIM has the capacity to resolve this issue and encourages manufacturers to work backwards from how they intend to manufacture their part in order to decide how to prototype it.
“If you’re basing your prototyping on 3D printing, you may get to a point where you get it qualified, then you need to decide how to produce. If you want to scale up to massive levels, you need to go into injection moulding because 3D printing is neither cost competitive nor quality competitive for higher volumes,” Staal argued. “If you decide ‘I’m only going to sell this [product] in low volumes’, then stay with 3D printing, but you need to make that decision before you go into market. That’s a pretty important decision to make.
“If I want to be able to scale into the millions, then I want to start with injection moulding from day one. The decision point is not, 'do I want to prototype on a 3D printer?' It's, 'what is my end production going to be? Is it going to be a highly specialised geometry or is it going to be a high run of product?’ If it’s high run, let’s start with injection moulding from day one. That’s why we’ve built this platform and that’s why we want to be able to comply with the requirements of the injection moulding industry.”
Parts manufactured in Mitsubishi Chemical's Kyronmax material.
While AddiFab is looking to meet the accuracy, repeatability and materials standards of the injection moulding space, it also hopes FIM can bring change to the sector. A big driver for the commercialisation of FIM was to help companies produce small volumes in the early days of product development to test the water. Typically, companies have to meet a minimum order quantity to injection mould parts but, prior to launch, will often be uncertain of the level of demand in the marketplace.
“Because of minimum order quantity, a lot of products get scrapped,” Staal said. “With Freeform Injection Molding, we don’t have a minimum order quantity. That means [users] can move into the market incrementally. When you hit the tipping point where you can see that it now makes sense to invest in a tool, you can make that investment because your demand is there. You can step away from Freeform Injection Molding into conventional injection moulding, but you haven’t over-invested in capacity from the beginning and you can do the capacity investment when demand has been verified. That means you save a lot of material and you save a lot of energy in the start-up of a new product.”
Similar tentativeness in launching products into market can be found at Mitsubishi Chemical, who recently invested in AddiFab as their partnership intensified. The company would quite like to make around 7,500 of its materials available in the additive manufacturing space, but with further hardware and process developments still needed, Mitsubishi can’t place an accurate measure on demand for many of its products. Without a guarantee of demand, the company is reluctant to invest in the required conversion processes.
Mitsubishi Chemical sees FIM as a possible gateway into the additive space, having users of FIM process o the shelf injection mouldable materials to produce prototypes, and perhaps draw conclusions as to the demand that way. That, AddiFab told TCT, is a main goal of the collaboration – and its general industrialisation efforts – but beyond, conversations are still to be had about how the partnership moves forward.
“Mitsubishi Chemical has aligned now with Freeform Injection Molding as a platform, it has a clear need we have demonstrated we can meet, but I’m not sure either Mitsubishi or AddiFab know where the collaboration is going to end up in a couple of years,” Staal finished. “We can see some evident opportunities with the KyronMAX, Tefabloc, Trexprene and DIAKON series of materials – materials which are difficult to 3D print. But I think Mitsubishi Chemical has about 450 subsidiaries. I haven’t even started talking to ten of them yet. It’s going to be a very interesting journey.”
