The early years of Equispheres can be divided into two; the time spent in the lab, formulating and testing the reliability, sinterability and fine feature ability of its aluminium alloys and the time spent convincing investors, regaling them with the potential applications of the additive manufacturing materials the company is bringing to market.
A couple of research projects and more than $30 million CDN later, Equispheres is now set to scale the production of its metal 3D printing powders by almost ten times in the next 18 months.
The company spent its first five years developing a patent-pending powder atomisation technique and once deemed ready, and in parallel with its further R&D and venture capital procurement efforts, commenced a limited release of aluminium powder to a select number of companies. Currently, with reactors running full time, it can manufacture up to 8,000 kilograms of powder a year. Harnessing the technical and financial support at its disposal, however, Equispheres is targeting two milestones in 2021.
“Through the design of a new reactor that we’re bringing in, we should be doing 40,000 kilograms a year by mid next year,” Doug Brouse, VP of Strategic Partners and Alliances, told TCT, “and by the end of next year, we expect to be at around 75,000 kilograms a year. [That] should satisfy the market need that we see for now, and then we’ll decide whether or not we’re going to add on from there.”
Brouse has his background in mechanical engineering, while also a founding member of aviation maintenance management software provider Mxi Technologies and, for a time, the company’s CEO. After the sale of Mxi, Brouse landed a role at the National Research Council of Canada, where he would develop and execute strategies to take innovative research into the industry and join up with Equispheres sometime after to do much the same.
The approach at Equispheres has been to get the ball rolling on a multiple of fronts, with a limited volume of metal powder being delivered to a select few customers, R&D continuing with multiple partners, and venture capital dollars being sought from the likes of HG Ventures, Lockheed Martin and Sustainable Development Technology Canada; all happening concurrently to facilitate the scaling up of the company’s manufacturing infrastructure. Equispheres’ output, for now at least, is concentrated solely on aluminium alloys, such as AlSi10Mg, with steels and Inconels to follow down the road. The company’s focus on aluminium materials is twofold: It assesses the current market offering below par, believing the sphericity and uniform size of the powder it manufacturers will enable superior printed parts, while also believing aluminium to be a growing market across many industries.
Equispheres
Today these industries, such as the automotive, aerospace and defence, are continually increasing their adoption of additive manufacturing technology, with metal laser sintering machines from EOS, SLM Solutions, Renishaw and TRUMPF among the most popular. While the adoption of the technology has happened swiftly, the development of applications has been slower, with processes not as repeatable as required, material options limited relative to traditional means of manufacture, and the desired volumes not economically viable with the technology. While Equispheres’ aluminium powders are compatible with machines from those providers - and promise to help increase the repeatability of processes, enhance the performance of parts and expand the number of materials available - it is also looking to tackle volume.
The company has outlined binder jetting technology as a key focus of its research endeavours, working with McGill University to examine the compatibility of its aluminium powders with many of the binder jet processes currently on the market. Through lab work completed last year, McGill researchers described Equispheres’ standard ALSi10Mg aluminium alloy powder as ‘exceptional in compaction free sintering’ with densification at >>95% and ‘excellent microstructure’. Work is now being done on the development of specialised binding agents, while Equispheres has reached out to several binder jetting companies, ‘pursuing quite aggressively’ the optimisation of its powders for their respective platforms.
Brouse believes enabling aluminium powders to be processed on binder jet machines represents quite the breakthrough. He explained: “Typically, aluminium has a pretty thick oxide layer and a low melting temperature, so with the sintering, you raise the temperature up to just below melting point to allow the atoms to diffuse across the boundaries. But the oxide layer inhibits that process and if you continue to raise the temperature to encourage the diffusion, the part shape will tend to ‘slump’. What happens is that the inside of the particle’s all kind of ‘gooey’ and it pops through the oxide layer like a balloon. You just can’t get the material to hold together properly.
“It’s been a challenge for the industry – aluminium is a big market and the binder jet printer [companies] are hoping to provide an aluminium material. We’re quite optimistic that our powder will be able to fill that gap.”
While mastering the sinterability of its powders will open the doors to binder jetting technology, Equispheres has also placed an emphasis on ensuring its metal powders enable printing processes that are repeatable and quick, with the ability to facilitate the production of fine feature parts. The company is also contributing to a research effort focused on the additive manufacture of aerospace components, joining Bombardier, Pratt and Whitney, Bell Helicopter Textron and McGill University. It is focusing on the relationship between defects characteristics and failure, the development of geometric manufacturing guidelines to enable better-designed parts, and further refine the relations between a part’s mechanical properties and its location in the build. While only officially a financial supporter, Lockheed is also working with Equispheres to identify opportunities.
The reason Equispheres exists is that Brouse and his colleagues considered the available feedstock on the market to not be of the quality to enable additive manufacturing users to maximise the potential of the technology, applying it repeatably and reliable to produce end-use parts. Its goal, as with any materials company in the 3D printing space, is to take the materials that manufacturers are familiar with and optimise them for additive. Of the materials that Equispheres could see available to users, they deemed many to allow too much moisture absorption, have oxide layers which were too thick, and a particle size distribution which was too broad.
“The whole idea is to change the physical properties of the powder to improve all those characteristics,” Brouse said, “to make them more spherical, ensure that there’s no fines, ensure that there’s minimum agglomerates and thin oxide layers. If you can achieve that, the powder behaves much more repeatably, it flows much faster than powder that has agglomerates and fine, which get in the way and interfere with the flowability, it spreads and packs much more densely - 30% more densely. As a result, the energy absorption from the laser is much more uniform, the powders melt much more uniformly and solidify much more uniformly. Your whole process becomes much more repeatable, which results in a higher design allowable because you know, quite precisely, what kind of mechanical properties you are going to get.”
Equispheres
Equispheres, in the early years of the company, has been delivering powder to a select few strategic partners to test and validate the company’s aluminium materials, with experiments carried out by academia being replicated in industrial environments. Each partner is doing so with a view, perhaps, to harnessing the materials further down the line to manufacture products. Any applications made with Equispheres so far are being kept undisclosed, though Brouse revealed there is huge interest for a number of reasons.
“When it comes to automotive, their focus is more on cost. Clearly, mechanical performance and repeatability is important to them, but the cost is paramount,” Brouse said. “The feature of our powder that is of the highest interest to them is that it can produce parts 50% more quickly by taking advantage of our superior packing density and printing with thicker layers. There’s been a real interest in the automotive industry to push the boundaries to see just how thick they can print with our powder.
“We have other customers in the aerospace industry looking to make very fine features in their product and they sought us out because they believed that the characteristics of our powder would enable them to meet that objective. We’re in the midst of the testing now and, based on preliminary data, we’re very optimistic. The requirement for high strength, that’s universal. What we’re seeing is particularly in the space industry, but also in the automotive industry, if you can consistently achieve higher strength, then you can use less material and you can lightweight your components. In the space industry, the cost to launch a kilogram is $20,000 – if you can make it with less material, it saves you a lot of money.”
Manufacturers, of course, are always looking to exploit a potential cost-saving, with every additive manufacturing vendor aware of the demand for the price of their machinery to come down if adoption is to continue to scale. Brouse posits that the next demand in the queue will be of feedstock cost. He says Equispheres will continue to make sure its production process is as efficient as possible, while also noting it doesn’t consume a lot of gas, compared to gas atomisation techniques, and doesn’t use a ‘finished product like wire’ as its feedstock. At the same time, the company will be looking to demonstrate the cost-savings that can be made, not only at the point of purchase but the point of application.
“We don’t want to have a race to the bottom,” Brouse finished. “We don’t expect to drive the price of our material to be the cheapest on the market as it provides superior quality and better productivity. Our plan is to share that value with our customers.”
