Robert Kniola steps off a plane at a Czech Republic airport, loads his 3D printed components into a hire car and sometime later turns up at the workshop of a farming company.
He is representing Vaderstad, a Swedish company that manufactures agricultural machinery, and has made the trip during the short corn planting season to help fix a prototype machine. His parts are printed with Fused Deposition Modelling (FDM) and Selective Laser Sintering (SLS) technology, the former done in-house and the latter via a service bureau. All Kniola has to do is transport the parts to the workshop safely – check – and see them installed on the piece of machinery to allow the client to begin planting corn – what could go wrong? Well, in the moment that Kniola hands over the parts to the client, they fall to the floor and shatter.
The printed parts were revived with the help of glue and duct tape, but Kniola came away from that trip in 2013 dissatisfied with not only the quality of 3D printed components, but that the technology was not so easy to operate in-house for many companies.
“When I saw the invoices from the SLS parts and I saw the brittle parts come out from it, I realised there was huge potential,” Kniola tells TCT. “We [also] made a lot of prototypes with our FDM machine, but the problem was it was too slow, and the resolution was too low. I talked to my colleague and said that maybe we could start something that could be the perfect mix between those two technologies: the simplicity of having a machine at your office but the performance from those big SLS machines.”
This, the co-founder and CEO of Wematter says, is the main driving force for the venture he started with CTO Henrik Lundgren a year later. Picking up some material scientists and software developers from the local Linköping University, Kniola and Lundgren started to make headway on their objective of bringing SLS safely into the office environment. They successfully procured investment in 2015 and then attracted personnel from the likes of Volvo and Toyota to sit on the company’s Board of Directors. Today, the company is made up of 22 people, mostly engineers from different domains (hardware, software, materials, mechanics), and has recently launched its Gravity 2021 3D printing system, with the Atmosphere chamber control unit following two months later.
“We have a high level of innovation in our company and our goal is to provide a really good solution for making prototypes at the office,” Kniola says.
Gravity 2021 is Wematter’s office-friendly SLS system, which comprises a build module, the Density water-jet cleaning unit, the Inertia powder collection unit and the recently-introduced Atmosphere platform. The printing equipment boasts a 300 x 300 x 300 mm build volume inside an 1800 x 750 x 650 mm frame and features a range of advancements compared with previous models of the machine released in years prior. Among those improvements are a more robust, reliable recoater and improved heat control to allow WeMatter to process more materials, while the machine can print at speeds of up to 1.2cm/ hour and has a laser spot size of 0.2mm. Gravity also harnesses a patented interface that allows powder to be loaded with the use of cartridges that are screwed into a slot at the back of the machine before Gravity then empties the powder within seconds. The powder is transported through the machine with the use of fans and vacuum pumps, which has also allowed Wematter to reduce the size of the machine.
Decentralisation of AM is what we stand for.
So far, this powder could be PA 11 and PA 12, but the company is now working to develop a bio-based polypropylene (PP) in a research effort funded by the Swedish government, as well as fibre-reinforced materials. PP, the company believes, will open Wematter up to the automotive and medical industries, with fibre-reinforced materials suitable for the robotics space because of its high stiffness. Meanwhile, a collaboration with Graphmatech, a Swedish firm specialising in graphene-based materials, is seeing work carried out to enable the printing of high-quality parts with graphene-enhanced properties, such as wear resistance, low friction and electrical conductivity. Wematter says it is open to working with other third-party materials suppliers too.
Supporting its hardware capabilities and materials offering is its Deep Space software. Almost half of Wematter’s employees work directly with software and, in the past few years, have developed a platform which users move through in three steps. First, users can upload and repair the 3D models with Wematter’s build preparation and slicing tools. Second, with the platform’s stacking capabilities, users can upload multiple 3D models into the virtual build volume and Deep Space will automatically work to pack the parts as dense as possible while maintaining the mechanical properties and details of each component. Certain parts can be locked into the place with Deep Space working to pack parts around it, or users can allow the software to pack in the most efficient way without restriction. The final step is where the user can step back in and manually alter the set-up before parts are sent to the printer to be built.
Wematter has endeavoured to load as much capability into its SLS 3D printing offering as possible, but always aiming to maintain its suitability to office environments. It is a stipulation of Wematter’s that has come as a result of its conversations with industrial users. Forest and garden tool manufacturer Husqvarna, one of Wematter’s customers and one of the first companies in Sweden to purchase a 3D printer in 1992, has been pivotal in Wematter’s understanding of the difficulties engineers have had in deploying additive manufacturing. The company has an additive manufacturing department in-house where it tackles complex parts with polymer 3D printing, but also several facilities, a couple of subsidiaries and a host of brands operating across the world. It now wants to decentralise its approach to additive and sees office-friendly machinery like that which Wematter offers as a way to do it.
Wematter CEO Robert Kniola
Wematter co-founder and CEO Robert Kniola.
“Finally an SLS [machine] that we can have here ourselves,” a testimonial from Husqvarna’s System Engineer Fredrik Karlsson reads on Wematter’s website, “we have been waiting a long time for this to come.”
“Decentralisation of AM is what we stand for,” Kniola says. “We believe that if you have a machine nearby your office, then it’s easier to print and iterate, print and iterate. When you have the product development department using AM every day, then the natural next step would be to put some production machines in the production facility, but the first step is to learn how to design for additive manufacturing. And in that space, we believe that we should provide a [product] that is almost as user friendly and safe as a photocopier machine, so you just upload the design, push print and the rest is up to our software and hardware solutions.”
Those software and hardware solutions are available to customers through two versions of a 36-month subscription offering. The standard version includes the Gravity printer; the Deep Space cloud service; Density, Inertia and Atmosphere; and service and support for three years, while a cheaper version does not include Atmosphere and limits the build volume. Prices are not being made public and materials are available at additional costs separate to the price of the subscription. Subscribers also have access to a powder recycling model based at Wematter's headquarters or local reseller. This model sees used but unsintered powder collected, filtered and quality tested before being mixed with 50% new powder inside Wematter's cartridges and sent back out to customers for use.
Using a subscription model, the quality of the service is as best the last day you use the machine.
Through its subscription offering, Wematter is wholly responsible for maintaining and servicing the rented equipment. It has installed diagnostics software on to its equipment to ensure Wematter can keep track of how the sensors, mechanics, lasers are behaving, springing into action should any of these components be faulty. Depending on the malfunction, Wematter will sometimes fix the machine onsite, other times replace the Gravity platform if repairs need to be made back at its own facilities and if maintenance is required in a 'critical moment’, Wematter offers the option to transfer the print job to its facilities, finish the print job there and ship it back the following day.
Hardware and software upgrades are also offered annually, with Kniola saying the subscription model is as much about offering customers flexibility as ensuring Wematter delivers the best service and support possible.
“By using a subscription model, the quality of the service is as best the last day you use the machine,” Kniola says. “When you buy something, it’s the opposite. It’s best the first day and then it degrades over time. It’s just like renting an apartment and if things don’t work you can always go to your landlord and tell them that you have to fix it because I pay for it. If you sell something, the incentives for service and support are lower than if you rent something out; you are forced to fix the machine to get paid.
“The subscription model is two parts: the rental fee per month, but then you also have the flexibility of how much powder you use. And we know that if our machine doesn’t work for a couple of days then the customer doesn’t consume powder. That hurts the most because powder is quite expensive in our industry.”
WeMatter at Etteplan
The Wematter and Etteplan teams with the Gravity 2021 platform.
So far, Husqvarna has been joined by the likes of automotive company Volvo, mining and infrastructure equipment manufacturer Epiroc, and medical technology firm SECTRA in taking up the subscription of Gravity. While each company has brought the technology in-house to enhance its product development processes, Wematter has also been able to procure valuable feedback from its early customers. Husqvarna, for example, is credited with alerting the company to the fragility of its recoater after hundreds of its engineers used the machine, sometimes feeding in designs not best suited to SLS 3D printing, but ‘instead of making design guidelines for those engineers, we wanted to redesign our machine so it is more robust,’ Kniola said. This was a recurring issue in Wematter’s early days, with many engineers simply wanting to push the same design they had used for injection moulding through the machine, but Kniola says that, ‘more and more’, users are working to make proper business cases for using the machine now. As a result, there are now demands for greater repeatability to ensure mechanical properties remain the same between prints. Wematter has partnered with Linköping University to help them enable this, while one of its investors is said to be a Siemens Energy executive, whose experience Wematter is also leaning on.
Since the turn of the year, the company has also partnered with Etteplan, a Swedish engineering services company. With Gravity 2021, Etteplan is to print functional prototypes to verify part designs, but the company is also working with Wematter to enhance its offering to market, with an immediate focus on software developments to ‘accelerate decentralisation of additive manufacturing’, but potentially expanding to other areas of its portfolio.
“We wanted to find a good collaboration platform,” Kniola says of Etteplan. “They have a lot of knowledge about additive manufacturing. So, first of all, they are a customer; they are using our machine for their customers to print prototypes, but they are also our consultant bureau, so they rent out consultants, design engineers, and in those cases, they can either use their own machine or maybe get the customer to start using our machine. And because they have extensive knowledge of additive manufacturing, they also want to try new technologies, new materials, new ways of working. That is the third aspect, where they co-develop.”
Wematter’s relations with large industrial companies goes beyond that of supplier and customer, and even collaborators. Since founding the company, Kniola has sought to ensure that it has extensive access to the experience and knowledge that exists within these industry heavyweights. In recent years, Håkan Dahllöf, the former President and CEO of Toyota Material Handling Europe; Kasper Josefsson, the VP of Production at Volvo Trucks; and Johan Westermark, former CEO of PiezoMotor have all been appointed to the company’s Board of Directors, allowing Kniola and his colleagues to tap into their respective expertise. Kniola believes having access to such experience will help to give Wematter the best chance of making an impact on the additive manufacturing market and in the offices of manufacturers around the world.
“First of all, they are long term. I mean, if you work in a company that has existed for 200 years, it’s very hard to be short term. And I think that culture is good for us to know because long term for us is five years. So, it’s good to have the stability and the long-term vision on our Board. The second thing is that we’re quite young and they are older with more experience and it’s very handy when you negotiate with those big customers and when they look at our numbers, we’re investor driven from investment money, and will be for several years, then it’s good to know that behind the young faces there’s also some stability.”
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