Ahead of last year's Formnext event, VELO3D bolstered its software offering with the launch of its Assure quality assurance platform. It had been designed as an 'inherent part' of VELO3D's portfolio which aimed to enable serial production.
A year on, it was spending its Formnext week hosting webinars such as 'How scale vastly reduces printed part costs' and 'Overcoming the challenge of printing larger parts'.
In between, the company had launched new metal 3D printing systems built to enable larger scales and larger parts, it had reached a total of $150m in funding and supplied 21 printed parts to Boom Supersonic for the roll out of its XB-1 aircraft. As Formnext came back around, albeit in virtual form, we discussed it all, in what has been a busy and productive year for CEO Benny Buller [BB] and his team.
Can you explain the motivation behind the Sapphire XC platform? How did this product come about and where can it have an impact?
BB: The “XC” represents “Extra Capacity” and is essentially a large format version of our existing Sapphire system, which is based on the laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) process. As our target markets are aerospace and defence, energy, and power generation, they share common characteristics in terms of having a strong need to reduce the production cost as well as produce larger components. But, creating a larger build volume and higher productivity system is only a small piece of the equation – there is still tension between what designers need, what is manufacturable and the capability to manufacture at the quality required. Maintaining consistent quality is only magnified as a customer approaches scale in volume or part size.
Sapphire XC was created to leverage all the capabilities introduced by the VELO3D Sapphire system in terms of freedom of design and quality control by offering industrial customers a way to produce the parts they want, through our SupportFree process with quality-assured production. Both existing and new customers see this value, and there are currently 13 pre-orders for Sapphire XC.
Velo XC correct dimensions in pic
When equipping this system with eight 1KW lasers, what considerations did you have to make as, up to now, many of the ‘higher throughput’ metal machines on the market boast four lasers?
BB: Eight lasers is unprecedented throughput for the AM industry and requires a lot of thoughtfulness when it comes to alignment, calibration, and overall management. We have a lot of experience in managing multi-laser optics and are the first to employ metrologies like in-situ overlay correction, beam stability, distortion mapping, and much more. These quality assurance protocols has earned VELO3D a strong reputation when it comes to repeatability, and we will apply that practice to Sapphire XC.
VELO3D also recently revealed its plan to roll out a Sapphire Gen 2 machine – can you explain why this has been necessary, just a few years since the launch of the machine?
BB: As we introduced the Sapphire system, our primary focus was on capability, then focused on quality, and after getting to a level that we are satisfied with both of those, we are now starting to push productivity, which of course reduces print cost. Sapphire Gen 2 is bolstered with both hardware and software improvements, making it a more competitive mid-sized LPBF system, producing anywhere from 10-50% improvement in both productivity and cost reduction. Sapphire Gen 2 can also be retrofitted on all installed machines starting in Q2 2021.
You now have a three-strong hardware portfolio with the Sapphire (Gen 2), Sapphire XC and the one-metre tall version – What has been the thinking around making these three systems available? How do they complement each other? And which kinds of companies are likely to adopt which machines?
BB: VELO3D is unique because the Sapphire family of systems all share a foundational architecture. In other words, the optical train, gas flow, metrology, SupportFree process, and non-contact recoater are all uniform among the systems. This uniquely enables customers to transfer their part recipes among the Sapphire systems without having to endure the vicious cycle of prototyping.
Each of these systems was launched with customer orders tied to them. Our metre-tall system has attracted significant interest by oilfield applications, and Sapphire XC is popular among space and aviation.
Sapphire is still going to be a very important work horse as this is a very cost effective and easy to work with system to develop and start production of parts. However, when scaling up production rate, instead of buying four additional Sapphire systems, a customer would be able to buy one Sapphire XC and accomplish the same capacity with roughly 3-4x lower cost.
Since the company’s launch, we’ve seen the expansion of its materials portfolio as well. What materials products can we expect next and what industry challenges are you trying to solve with the roll out of these upcoming materials?
BB: We're stretching more into Nickel based superalloys. This enables greater engine efficiency in our customer's engines, as higher temperature combustion is key to driving greater product performance.
Velo3D Boom Supersonic XB-1
In October, Boom Supersonic unveiled its XB-1 aircraft with more than 20 VELO3D-enabled components – how significant is your collaboration to the AM and Aerospace industries and how do you foresee this collaboration growing?
BB: We are highly collaborative with the space and aerospace industry and are working with a number of these end users on application development. We guide them through the fact that they do not need to compromise their designs in a painful way to make them manufacturable by AM. Additive manufacturing should enable design innovation, instead of modifying designs to be suitable for additive manufacturing.
The great thing about Boom Supersonic and other aerospace companies is that they push our technology to the finite limits and force us to be better – improving both part quality and the ability to manufacture a new class of parts. How much thinner can titanium be printed without cracking? How can we improve our residual stress process even more? These are questions that we have to ask ourselves daily, so we enable the manufacturing of even more complex components.
You are also collaborating with Lam Research Corp to develop materials and applications in the semiconductor space – what opportunities lie in this market and how important is it for the VELO3D business going forward?
BB: Using AM, specifically the LPBF process, to build parts for the semiconductor industry is a completely untapped use case. AM is a way to deliver better and a more uniform process to the semiconductor wafers, and to invent new processes and systems quicker. Lam Research is truly pioneering this for semiconductors and has partnered with VELO3D to develop a process for a novel alloy. VELO3D's heritage is from the semiconductor industry, given that a significant portion of our leadership team migrated from there to AM.
The company has procured a lot of investment capital over the last few years – with many product launches already coming to pass, how else do you intend to leverage this investment going forward?
BB: We will start our international expansion in particular to Europe. We also will increase our marketing and applications support organisations. We are in the phase of educating the market on what is possible, educating the design community how they can make better products not limited by legacy Additive constraints. We also are investing much more in R&D coming out of 2020, with multiple systems being developed in parallel.
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