In September, five companies were named as winners of the 2023 Formnext Start-up Challenge.
Among them was Endless Industries, a German firm founded inside the Technical University of Berlin and bringing to market a printhead and nozzle technology designed to deposit fibre-reinforced 3D printed parts.
As Formnext approached, we caught up with Endless Industries’ Dr. Mathias Czasny [MC] and Stephan Körber [SK] to learn more about the technology underpinning its hardware products, the proprietary software developed to support it, and what impact the company hopes to have on the additive manufacturing market.
I understand Endless Industries is bringing to market a printhead and nozzle technology rather than building and selling machines. Can you explain the technology behind that printhead and nozzle?
SK: At a certain level with an FDM part you have limits. The limit is the material. And with our technology, you can basically upgrade the plastic FDM 3D printing, and you get parts that are as strong as aluminium, as light as plastic and they're 80% cheaper than milled aluminium. Currently, we think that prototyping, jigs and fixtures, so everything you need for your production plant, and robot grippers, are the main applications. And for that, we have three products. So, we have our patented printheads that basically are there to cut the continuous fibre you have in your carbon fibre materials, you have the fibre materials. So, right now, we have carbon fibre, for example, we can also do glass fibre, natural fibres with different polymers, right. So, that's where our main knowledge is right in the materials. And of course, you always need three parts for the whole equation to make sense. You also need software that basically tells the printer where to put the carbon fibre or like fibre lines and where to put the normal polymers.
Can you explain the temperature requirements and the durability of the nozzle that allows it to process fibre-reinforced polymers?
MC: Our printhead, it looks more or less like the standard printhead in everyone's FDM printer, but what is maybe new is the lever and the lever is important because inside the printhead there is a cylinder which provides the cutting mechanism. We have two holes inside it and if you pull the lever, you will close the hole inside it and you will cut the fibre and right now we are fitting a PTFE tube inside it to guide the fibre materials which limit us to a printing temperature to 250 degrees. So, this is the process temperature right now. And this is the reason why we are providing the PETG, PA 12, PA 11, and PP filaments. The first product will be a PETG because it's very simple, but the other ones are in the pipeline, which we are investigating right now.
Endless Industries
It's very important to understand that the cutting mechanism is in the hot zone. So, we are cutting only the fibre material because the polymer itself is already in a molten state and you push the polymer only away so you're cutting only the fibre and this has different benefits like you can print thicker carbon fibre rovings, it's the raw material, because the carbon fibre itself are in a bundle of fibres, and typically you are using, in normal FDM technology, 1,000 single fibres per bundle, very thin, it's the thinnest material you can get from the fibre manufacturer and, for example, we are using 3k fibres, so 3000 single fibres a bundle, which in the end, the volume output is three times higher compared to the standard right now, which is on the market. And, about the temperature, right now, we are limited to 250 degrees. But of course, we are already working for the next generation of the printhead which allows us to print also at higher temperature because of course, at the end, we would like to print PEEK and there are a lot of interesting materials between PETG and PEEK like polyamide six, polycarbonate, for example. So, these are the aims we will focus on the next year.
Get your FREE print subscription to TCT Magazine.
Exhibit at the UK's definitive and most influential 3D printing and additive manufacturing event, TCT 3Sixty.
Usually, the point at which fibre is cut in a nozzle is higher. What has been the challenge previously in terms of cutting the fibre at a lower point in the nozzle up until now?
MC: The reason why it is like that was very simple because a normal composite filament has much smaller diameter like the normal 1.75mm filament, so it's a diameter of around 0.35mm to 0.4mm. And for the small filaments, it's very simple to use a small knife and only cut it because the material is brittle. And if you guide it through an open section with two holes before and afterwards, you can go with a knife through it and cut it very simple, the forces are not very high. And for processing, it makes sense in the first few do it in the room temperature state. And of course, the people who are using these technologies they patented it. And our way was during the scientific part was investigating what is not patented, what is the whitespace in the IP area, what we can patent maybe by ourselves. So, we did a lot of IP investigations and research and see what's going on there. And then we figured out there is an open space in this hot zone and the second topic was then of course, what kind of benefits we can create out of this?
So, what we can do with these thicker fibre bundles, this was a real benefit. Because during our first research project, if you have prosthetic parts, it's very big. So, if you need to wait three days for the part, it's the wrong technology, you need to upscale it and with the thicker fibre material, you can print it, for example, overnight. So, the benefit for the end customer is very fast. He gets very fast his parts for example. And so, it was both direction which we combined one side, the IP strategy, the open space, what we can patent or what is new? And of course, the second one, what are the benefits for the process and for the materials and both did very well together.
Can you talk me through the capabilities of the fibre placing software as well?
SK: It was clear from the beginning that we had to have a special software. And it didn't make sense for us to develop our own slicer. So, it was important for us, if we have the business model of working together with different partners, they all have their different solutions, some like Simplifier, some like Prusa Slicer, and some others that have their own proprietary solutions. So for us, it was important that our fibre placing module, that's what we call it, is compatible with lots of slicers. So it should be slicer agnostic. And we developed a software that basically does that now. So, we basically have a small module at the beginning of the process then we use Different slicers in the middle. And then we have a post processing step. At the moment, it's separate programmes but we are working on a solution that allows us to basically have everything in one, and the customer can just choose what kind of slicer module they want to use.
What it can do at the moment is two things. You either can have a one click solution, meaning that you have no idea about fibre composites, right, so you want to have a stiff part, you don't want to deal with anything, you just push a button, can change some parameters, and the software will just give you the one click solution. So, you have your stiffer part, put your geometry in, you get a geometry out, and then the slicing process does the rest for you. And with our process, you can manually define where you want to put the fibres, so you have to have a bit more effort in there. But we found that there's a big customer group, meaning the people that already know how to work with fibre materials and fibre composites, they want to have the fine control over where to put the fibres in the part. And that is something that differentiates us extremely from the competition. Because with the competition, you get you get what you get, you can change something, but you can't always get the fine control. So, with these customers, we work on a solution that actually gives them the possibility of exactly telling the slicer where to put the fibres. That's one big thing they can do. You have the one-click solution, and then you have the full control if you want.
What can you tell us about the materials development roadmap?
MC: We are using a protrusion process. And right now, it's of course in more or less lab scale, because we would like to investigate a lot of different parameters and material combinations from the raw fibre material and from the raw polymer. So right now, we are producing several hundreds of grammes per day, but we are also working right now working on the upscaling so that we can get with one process line up to one tonne per year. And then of course, in the next years, we can upscale them by different types of machines, which we will specify on different material groups, which we will like to sell our customers. So of course, we need to feedback from the market, what is the material combination that is needed, how we should define our upscaling process.
We see some sweet spots like PETG plus carbon fibre because it's very, very simple. You don't need to focus on moisture, on different types of materials, it's very, very simple process. And second material like a lot of people asking us is polyamide six plus carbon fibre, which is also very great. But with the polyamide, six, there you really need to know what's going on with the moisture level in the matrix material. Because if you don't focus on it, you get air bubbles inside and more like a foaming material, which will not bond or hold together the carbon fibre very well. So, you get the weak composite. And you need to know that. But for some applications, it's necessary and this is the reason why we are focusing really right now and find out what is the materials we need.
Endless Industries
What kind of impact do you think this technology could have on the market?
SC: We see ourselves as complementary to what's already on the market. Markforged is really good at what they're doing. They're great machines, quality is nice, but there's lots of people that are kind of frustrated with the situation, they want to get into market, they see that there's potential there. But for some reason, the Markforged solution or like other smaller solutions doesn't work for them. So. what we see is that there's a big need for big parts, right? That's also where fibres are really, really good. If you give them more space, if you give them more length, that makes a lot of sense. So, we see a big hole in the market for industrial size, big 3D printers that are affordable. we see that there's so much more potential if we, not democratise, don't want to like use the big words, but give everybody a chance and a place at the table. And I think, currently, the market for carbon fibre 3D printing is hindered by that. It's like the limitation of materials, the limitation of what kind of machines you can use and the prices of course.
So, that's also one thing we want to give an advantage with our customers, if you use thicker fibres, you can buy them cheaper, because the thinner the fibre, the more expensive. So, we will also have a cost advantage there that we want to share with the customers and see where it goes. Because I think there's lots of applications that would make sense with fibres, but it can be hindered by either material selection, price, machine selection, and we want to see what it can achieve.
