Essentium
Essentium HSE
Rendering of Essentium's HSE platform.
A group of engineers walk into an additive manufacturing (AM) trade show.
Through their work in the semiconductor space, they’re used to scale, speed, accuracy, and options. Five to ten years ago, they leave disappointed.
And then, at another conference, they get talking to a company working to bring better performing materials to the additive market, one backing extrusion technology since it is deemed to best retain the properties of polymer chemistry. They share the same gripe, that extrusion AM technology, as it is, can’t perform to the levels required in the most demanding manufacturing environments.
“As we looked at the marketplace for printers, when we did a survey of the extrusion machines out there that could address the factory floor, there was nothing. I mean nothing,” Blake Teipel, CEO and co-founder of Essentium, reckoned. “When our guys walked around at AMUG two, three years ago, most of the printers to them didn’t even look like they were on. They were moving, laying down material, and they would go up to them and say, ‘why are these moving so slowly?’ That’s our team. Our team is incredulous: ‘Why do you even consider this acceptable? This is not acceptable.’ It’s their whole mindset, because in [the] semiconductor [industry], you’ve got to make a thousand laptops a day and a million iPhones every week and a half to hit your iPhone targets, so speed is a whole different mindset.”
Essentium was founded in 2013, by Teipel; his wife, Elisa who is VP of Innovation; Erik Gjovik, Chief Product Officer; Lars Uffhausen, Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer; Terry Macneish, Head of R&D for Machines; Ryan Vano, Head of Filament Production; and Brandon Sweeney, Head of R&D of Materials. Its foundation is in the development of materials, spurred on in some part by seeing too many Yoda heads and Eiffel Towers adorning trade show cabinets with too few meaningful applications, but primarily prompted by the experiences of the team, from those with background in the semiconductor market to those working with the military.
Sweeney, for example, passed through the Army Research Lab (ARL) inside the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. During his tenure there from 2010 through 2012, the ARL had 3D printing hardware from a host of the major vendors in the space, but too often parts would fail. “There was no ability for a 3D printed part to withstand impact loading, fatigue, or cyclic loading,” Teipel retells. “What kind of impact loading do you get on the factory floor? A tonne. The materials that were available and the printers that were available were simply insufficient.”
Through the years, Teipel and his team have seen extrusion hardware improve to the point where the reliability of parts is no longer the problem. The materials, with the aid of chemistry giants introducing themselves to the market, have improved gradually too. But speed, without compromising the performance of the printed part, remained a barrier. Essentium spotted a gap in the market, per Teipel, an unmet need, and began its pursuit.
Essentium
Essentium HSE
The company got to work on a series of printing systems now known as High Speed Extrusion (HSE), which boasts a 740 x 510 x 650 mm build volume and nozzles which heat up to 380°C, 450°C, or 500°C in seconds depending on whether you're using the $75k low-temperature (LT) version; $95k standard (S) set-up; or $115k high-temperature (HT) system. All have enclosed chambers, support from Essentium's digital thread, and single heads, though a dual head machine is currently in development. And by teaming a high-speed extrusion system with a high-speed motion system, powered by linear motors and a linear encoder, Essentium thinks it’s made some headway in enabling additive at scale.
“From an acceleration standpoint, I can achieve 3G acceleration. I can achieve linear motion speed of greater than a metre per second. I can print at greater than 500mm a second, so that’s actually laying down plastic while you’re moving at half a metre per second. That’s the kind of print speeds that we can achieve with our motion system,” pitched Teipel.
“And the accuracy, in a single axis we have the ability to achieve positional accuracy on the tens of microns scale by the time you have tolerance stack up and machine vibration and oscillation and harmonics. We can hit three axis positional accuracy of about 40 microns. When you’re printing a part, like a jig for a circuit board, you’ve got to know that your motion system can hit the dimensional feature accuracy that at a minimum matches, but ideally exceeds, the feature accuracy requirement of the device and we can do that with our motion system.”
Supplementing the capabilities of the hardware, Essentium has tuned the materials accordingly to process at speed. There are more than 30 materials the company has developed and certified (meaning material profiles exist in the Essentium build prep software). They span from basic polymers to composites to two Ultrafuse stainless steel options to an ‘unnamed secret material’. All are listed on a product sheet handed out at AMUG, a tick chart alongside indicating whether they run on all three LT, S, and HT variations of the HSE 180 platform, or only one or two of them - all Essentium-certified materials can be processed on the HT system.
Such is the depth of the portfolio, and Essentium’s scale manufacturing focus, some materials were nearly missed off the product sheet: “One of the guys had to remind me to include PLA, because I’m not even thinking about PLA,” Teipel joked. “We have PLA, we toughen it with some TPU, it’s a great PLA as far as prototyping and so forth goes.
“[But] our thesis is built around scale. Our thesis is built around volume. We are not going to try to make our money on prototyping volumes, we’re going to make our money on production volumes.”
To enable that to happen, customers buying materials in bulk will see the cost curve come down, Essentium quoting costs in accordance with the volume purchased. With more materials comes more parts printed, and the more parts there are to print, the more machines need to be installed to print them. That’s the Essentium thought process.
"If we can make the designers and the manufacturing guys learn to trust in HSE like they trust a mill, like they trust a machine tool, then we win."
In a recent survey the company sponsored, in which hundreds of North American manufacturers were posed a series of questions relative to their thoughts and usage of AM - 114 responding in full - 42% believed 3D printing technology is too costly, 35% said the materials are too expensive, and 34% said they don’t think AM scales for their needs. There’s still some convincing to be done, then, but with 60% reporting current usage of 3D printing for manufacturing aids and tooling jigs (for context, 61% of respondents use it for ‘simple’ prototyping), Teipel eyes a gateway into many a business’ consideration.
“When you think about the making of stuff, for every consumer-held widget there is an ecosystem of support widgets that had to be engineered by manufacturing engineers that never see the light of day,” Teipel said, leaping from his stool to gather four HSE-printed fixtures designed for the semiconductor space. The first is a circuit board rack, where chip sets, micro controllers, transistors, diodes, and resistors are attached to the printed circuit board (PCB) during assembly. “Consumers don’t think about this little device, even most engineers don’t think about this little device. It’s a factory floor aid that has a legitimate use to functional parts and end-use parts using the factory environment in order to enable the engineering and production of consumer goods. There’s tens of thousands of these things that are made every day.”
The second of Teipel’s printed samples is a pick and place jig, which traditionally would be filled by hand, but in more forward-thinking factories is now being delegated to a robotic arm. It’s an application that requires many of the things Essentium is determined to provide. It has to be produced in an electrostatic discharge (ESD) material – Essentium has two ESD TPU grades and two ESD PETG grades – and it has to be clean, fast to produce, cheap to produce, and dimensionally accurate. If the robot is missing its target because of inaccuracies in the print then there’s an unwanted disruption, and another seed of doubt placed in the engineer’s mind.
Essentium
Essentium HSE
Essentium’s goal is to enable additive manufacturing at scale, but the barriers to achieve that aren’t in the team’s blind spot. The HSE system is currently in the hands of a selection of early access programme partners, and thus the company is still in the process of reducing the pain points for end users of additive technology. Those pain points typically manifest themselves in failed parts, inaccurate parts, underperforming parts, or slow-to-build parts, and Teipel believes once you ensure that components can be made repeatably, accurately, with up-to-scratch materials, and done so quickly, engineers will then have the time and will to design for additive.
“In extrusion additive, if you can get rid of parts that fail, and insufficient material options, and a machine that’s very slow, then you start to be able to give that designer the trust to use that tool right. If the designer doesn’t feel like they can trust the tool, they’re not going to use it. If you don’t have trust you don’t actually have design for additive. We, as an additive manufacturing industry, will not get where we want to go until people are designing parts for this process.
“I was a design engineer, [and] 15-20% of the time you spend designing a part is getting the geometry right, the shape of it. The rest of the time you spend designing your part is figuring out what material and what process can come together to make the part survive in real life. We’re not going to see design for additive or scale of a lot of manufacturing technologies, including HSE, until the platforms are reliable enough to become trusted. If we can make the designers and the manufacturing guys learn to trust in HSE like they trust a mill, like they trust a machine tool, then we win. And we only win because our customers win, because we’ve taken away a pain point for them.”
As the conversation winds down and lunch beckons, visitors continue to circle the AMUG 2019 expo, a curious attendee stopping by the Essentium stand. The first question put to Blake Teipel as we sat between the HSE and a shelf full of printed parts was about the company's motivation. Nine long answers later, through hardware, materials, target applications, the barriers to volume additive production, it became clear that it’s simply to make sure that when those that manufacture at scale come to shows like AMUG now and in the future, they no longer leave disappointed.
