Wayland was a master smith of Germanic folklore; such was the fame of his prowess at forging that one of the greatest warriors in literature, Beowulf, had Wayland make his breastplate. Wayland was said to be able to manufacture an arsenal that no other man could. As far as additive manufacturing company naming conventions go, it is a pretty strong start.
Wayland Additive is a new British company with a technology that recently secured £3m in funding from Longwall Ventures after a period of Innovate UK plus industry R&D development funding. Fundamentally, it is a metal electron beam powder bed fusion technology, but its backstory is a classic case of the mother of the invention being necessity.
Ian Laidler, CTO at Wayland Additive, was tasked by bosses at Reliance Precision - a one-hundred-year-old engineering firm - to investigate metal 3D printing technology. The then Technical Director examined the current technologies on offer with the eye of somebody who has spent three decades mastering semiconductor manufacturing. For Ian, the current metal additive manufacturing technologies didn't have the repeatability or reliability he’d come to expect.
"I have a background in electron-beam lithography from the semiconductor industry and realised that there were things in current electron-beam additive manufacturing that could be improved," explained Ian during a meeting at Formnext 2019. "I recruited my old team from the lithography world and first set upon resolving the Achilles heel of current electron beam AM - charging of the powder."
The charging of the powder is the reason for what is known as a smoke event or 'smoking'; which can ruin both builds and require machine cleandown. To minimise smoking, current systems pre-sinter the surface layer with rapid scanning of the beam before the actual melting. This presintering workaround means de-powdering is difficult (parts with complex internal channels are virtually impossible to process with electron beam), processing options, materials and recyclability are restricted.
It is the opinion of the Wayland Additive team, including Director of Business Development, Peter Hansford - a man with decades of AM experience - that the charging of the powder has been electron beam manufacturing's rate-limiting step. According to Peter, from a metallurgy perspective, the electron beam is the superior process, but because builds exist on a knife-edge of potential smoking, adoption has proved slower.
Leading the way
The answer, developed by Ian and his team, is what Wayland is calling Neutral Beam Technology (NeuBeam). By addressing the fundamental physics of the electron beam additive process, NeuBeam technology allows printing of fully dense parts without creating a hard sinter-cake.
"Powder charging no longer exists in our machine," CEO Will Richardson revealed. "We still heat the parts so that they are stressfree, but the user chooses the temperature based on metallurgy requirements, not based on trying to get the process to work.
"NeuBeam is a best of both worlds situation; you still have the ease of use you get with laser-sintering while maintaining the advantages in the productivity and metallurgy you expect from electron beam. You also have fewer supports so you don't need Wire EDM to remove your parts from a build plate, you don't need a stress-relieving furnace, you don't need a complicated powder recovery system. And because we've removed the heating step from the layer build, there's a speed advantage too."
From an electron beam powder bed fusion perspective (there are companies like Sciaky and Norsk Titanium using electron beam wire melting additive processes), Wayland is not the only company working on improvements. The GE acquired Arcam technology is the most well-known and lists companies like Stryker as superusers. GE Additive unveiled its latest Spectra machine under the Arcam brand at Formnext 2019. There's also Freemelt, which is based in the same city as Arcam and employs several former Arcam staff, and then there's JEOL working with the Japanese Technology Research Association for Future Additive Manufacturing (TRAFAM).
JEOL is an expert in electron beam microscopy and during 3D Printing Tokyo 2017 (Now TCT Japan), revealed that it was working on an electron beam powder bed fusion system. An update from TRAFAM in July 2019 said that JEOL was currently analysing the effects of using a surface oxide layer to suppress the smoke phenomena but is yet to reveal timeframe of a machine's potential release.
The roadmap
After an initial meeting at Formnext, the Wayland team invited TCT to its new HQ in Huddersfield UK, just as it was moving in - literally - the floors were still being laid with the entire team mucking in.
In many aspects Wayland is entrepreneurial in its spirit (this project only started three years ago), but the vast experience in the room makes one hesitant to call it a start-up. A start-up conjures images of astroturf, slides, with fresh-faced t-shirts and trainers types on fixie bikes - this is a start-up Yorkshire style. There are, refreshingly, no frills to the Wayland team, it is experience and expertise with frugality and functionality at the forefront.
TCT was given an exclusive look at the prototype machine that had only recently been installed at the new dedicated facility. There's not a great deal to report on what the machine looks like, but that is precisely the point; the team including software engineers, materials scientists, as well as Ian Laidler's aforementioned electron beam experts, are there to make the process repeatedly work, not look great from a marketing perspective.
The next steps for Wayland are building in-process monitoring tools, which, according to Ian Laidler, have the potential to be far superior to anything else on the market.
"Electron beam technology has a better suite of tools for in-process monitoring because we have the electrons, we have optical, we're a true thermal process. You can monitor everything in that chamber. We can actually give you the true temperature of your whole powder bed in-process as it happens. We can tell you about the thermal history of your material during the process. We can tell you about the topography of the surface so you can look to defects as they occur. We're trying to cover all the bases, make sure that we've got information someone needs to make that process reliable, as well as making it more stable and more capable from the outset. There's quite a lot of development options available from our system which hasn't been there on the market to date."
In 2021 the Wayland team expects to build and sell just six machines, each machine and customer will have a dedicated team working on applications, material and repeatability. "The worst advert is a machine sitting idle," said CEO Will Richardson. Just as the tools Wayland the Smith made for the folklore warriors, Wayland Additive is building machines to be used.
