Digital Manufacturing Centre
A bridge displaying a ‘Welcome to Silverstone Park’ banner confirms Google Maps has faithfully led me to my desired location. But it isn’t until I drive underneath and hear the roar of engines whizzing around the track that I realise just how in the famous Silverstone Park I am – and suddenly very self-conscious of the humble Ford Fiesta that got me there.
A dampened hum of rasping exhausts can still be heard from the top floor of the Digital Manufacturing Centre as I wait to meet with the team who have chosen Silverstone as the location for their vision for the future of UK advanced manufacturing. As I sit with a cup of coffee, that hum, you can’t help but feel energised by it.
“This is the heart of it,” says CEO Kieron Salter, gesturing to the team that’s busy speaking with customers and making design reviews on incoming data before it heads downstairs to the production floor where a suite of additive manufacturing (AM) machines will turn files into final parts.
Salter opened the DMC in 2021 following nearly a decade providing largely polymer 3D printing to major Formula 1 teams through engineering outfit KW Special Projects, which now sits next door. From there, Salter says the DMC was able to “hit the ground running” by working with existing customers before tapping into the high-end automotive sector, which is now paving the way for grander ambitions in aerospace, space and defence. The first major milestone on this journey was gaining AS9100 Rev D and ISO9001:2015 certification in January this year. The certifications mean the DMC can now directly supply AM parts to certified private and government aerospace, space and defence customers.
“We're hoping now that we'll start to switch on some of those aerospace programmes that will then lead to serious production, which is what we're looking for,” Salter explains. “We don't want to be a prototyping business. We can still make volumes as low as one and they can be for prototyping purposes but the main objective, especially in automotive, is going through the prototype phase into the production of parts that have used the exact same process from prototype right the way through.”
The DMC is currently running a number of major but confidential automotive programmes which Salter says have hundreds of 3D printed part numbers on board. When TCT visited back in April, Nigel Robinson, the DMC’s Chief Operating Officer, shared that the facility has turned close to 1,000 parts into PPAP quality, fully traceable components since it opened.It is the key, as Kieron describes, that has “opened the doors” to conversations in each of those areas.
The DMC to your KWSP
Last year the DMC embarked on a partnership with the Satellite Applications Catapult in an effort to expand the UK’s stake in the space industry and help to establish a national space supply chain for advanced manufacturing.
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Exhibit at the UK's definitive and most influential 3D printing and additive manufacturing event, TCT 3Sixty.
But embedding new technologies into established supply chains isn't easy. “The tricky bit is navigating the protocols and the supply chain because as much as there are lots of grand ambitions around using SMEs and a greater level of engagement with SMEs, and additive being a part of the future, they’re still flowing all of that down through the normal Tier 1s," Salter explains. "There are so many different people that we need to negotiate with and make aware of us to make sure that we're part of those deals, but the usual suspects are still filtering through so there's going to be a challenge.”
The DMC’s journey, which began with just one FDM 3D printer at KWSP ten years ago, before graduating to a third within the space of a year, has given the team first-hand experience of the complexities of getting AM parts onto automotive supply chains. This frustration sparked an idea – could they could create their own?
The colocation of the DMC and KWSP facilities is intentional. While each offers a different skillset, they are designed to mutually exist together so that if an engineering project comes into KWSP, it has a ready-made advanced manufacturing supply chain to tap into next door.
“KWSP Special projects as an engineering service provider and a solutions provider can now design with confidence for AM parts, knowing that we have our own supply chain for delivering that,” Salter explains. “We can go to certain customers and say not only can we design the product that we want but we can integrate additive manufacturing for lightweighting or reduction in cost or tooling, and we have a greater level of design authority.”
Salter offers an example of an interior grab handle; a relatively mundane part that the team were able to redesign in two ways; one that’s 60% lighter but maintains a similar geometry to the original, and a second distinctively additive-looking part that shaves another 20% and further improves performance. But being distinctively additive isn’t the goal.
Robinson said: “We don't actually want to tell them that [it’s additive]. We want them just to accept it's a part that's on the car and performing how it should be.”
Another example is a hollowed-out, lightweight 3D printed chassis insert that goes inside the carbon monocoque of a Formula 1 vehicle. It's a complex structure that would be incredibly difficult to machine with the same lighweighting outcomes.
“One of our challenges, and will be for some time, is that most of our customers don't yet know they need to be our customer because they haven't already made that conclusion that they need additive manufacturing as a solution,” Salter says. “The most successful engagements we have are when we get customers that are intrigued. They want to know a bit more about additive and they think it might provide a benefit but they don't yet know how. We pick a couple of case studies and examples from them. We start working with them and asking, how would we redesign it if additive was now in the toolbox?”
A similar mindset has been adopted over the road at KW Special Projects where Salter challenges me to identify the 3D printed parts, admittedly indistinguishable to the untrained eye, on a 40% scale model of a Formula 1 vehicle. The team has been gradually selecting parts and making design changes to improve aerodynamics, and there is now a smorgasbord of AM parts on board including polymers, metals and larger components made with additive casting.
“Lead time is clearly a benefit. Manufacturing on demand is a benefit. You don't have to commit to a minimum quantity of 2,000 parts,” Salter says. “From a performance point of view, it’s lightweight without making it look very ‘additive’. You’d be really hard pressed to spot the additive on this car.”
Through the doors
“The whole infrastructure with powder management, validation and verification, is absolutely critical to the confidence levels in additive going forward,” Robinson says of assimilating additive into supply chains. When we go through the doors and take in a bird’s-eye view of the production DMC’s floor, it’s clear the team has taken note.
There are three Renishaw RenAM 500Q systems running titanium, Scalmalloy and aluminium, a result of a decision made early on to dedicate machines to material families. The third system, however, is a RenAM 500Q Flex, which the DMC was asked to be an early beta tester of, and is designed to facilitate quick material changeovers. Alongside them is a suite of polymer machines from 3D Systems and Stratasys including FDM, Selective Absorption Fusion, and DLP technologies. But Salter is keen to emphasise that the DMC is not simply printing parts and claiming 'job done.' The facility has invested in post-processing equipment from DyeMansion, CNC centres, and a dedicated metrology lab to ensure that the sealed packages of fully finished parts I spot stacked on shelves behind these machines, coupled with traceability documentation, are ready to be delivered to end users with the confidence you’d expect from an established manufacturing supply chain.
Having a full suite of AM technologies at its disposal means the DMC and KWSP are ready to respond to the myriad of engineering challenges that come through its doors, whether it’s a cycling project with Team GB or scaling production of an automotive bracket. Still, there are misconceptions to be fought. Many customers who have stepped into the DMC with the notion of 3D printing as purely a prototyping tool in mind have, through education, discovered that AM can offer much more. But there has to be a reason, and whether that’s speed to market, lower cost tooling or lightweight design, the DMC is ensuring its users understand where it makes sense.
“Let's not try and solve a problem that doesn't actually exist,” as Robinson puts it.
To facilitate that, there’s an educational element including a dedicated space where industry organisations or suppliers like Laser Lines (which has supplied the DMC with its Stratasys kit) can provide AM introductions and learning for newcomers. The DMC is also involved in outreach with schools in what it hopes will serve as inspiration for the next generation of engineers. If the young engineers currently operating machines on its shop floor are any indicator, the message is getting through.
When I last spoke to Salter about his mission for the DMC (during a Zoom tour amid the onset of the pandemic), his ambitions went as far as one day planting a DMC flag in space. Space is evidently an exciting prospect for the team, particularly as the UK government is said to be aiming to capture 10% of the sector by 2030. But whether it’s the myriad of Formula 1 components dotted across each site or, the giant wind tunnel that sits inside KWSP, or simply recognising the importance of speed in getting a product to market, on the track or off, it's clear that strong foundation in automotive, that distinctive hum, is driving the DMC to new opportunities.
