Stratasys metals RAPID + TCT 2018
A crowd gathers around a display of aluminium parts manufactured with Stratasys' metal 3D printing technology.
Nearly two months ago to the day, Stratasys made an announcement perhaps long overdue. For years now, the company has batted away questions about its metal additive manufacturing intentions, continuing to deliver prototyping and production solutions capable of printing in plastics, and only touch the metal side as an investor. Then seemingly out of nowhere it revealed it is developing a metal 3D printing technology, for short-run manufacturing, and it would be launched at RAPID + TCT 2018.
Launched was overstating it. But Phil Reeves, the company's VP Strategic Consulting, did take part in the event's Keynote Kick-Off on Monday April 23rd to tease details of the technology. A proprietary jetting process, Stratasys is looking to exploit the 75 million tonnes of aluminium parts manufactured each year and integrate metal AM into existing factories. Later that week, Reeves sat down with TCT to give a little more insight into the Stratasys metal AM technology, the motivations behind the move, and when we can expect to find out more.
TCT: Stratasys has recently announced its venture into the metal 3D printing space, why has Stratasys decided to announce this now?
Phil Reeves (PR): “We’ve been looking at it for a long time and we’ve been asked a million times 'What are you doing about metal?' We looked at the metal market and I always talk about red water theory and blue water theory. Red water is if there’s a load of sharks do you jump in? [No] but there’s a reason why they’re all there. Is it because there’s loads of fish? Or do you jump in the blue water? And we looked, and well there’s a lot of people in laser based additive, and in the last two or three years there’s been an almost exponential growth in the number of companies in there, and is there a market for it? Is one technology any better than the other? If you’re going to bring something to market in there do you bring out another laser based system, or another E-beam system, and if you do, how do you differentiate it?
"The rationale was to make some investments in metal additive. We invested in LPW [Technology, a metal powder company based in the UK], we invested in Harvest Technologies, which was the biggest metal bureau over here [in the United States], and then spent three years looking at what type of powders are people buying, how are they using the machines, what is Harvest getting asked for that they can’t do? Where is there some blue water? In parallel to that, we were looking at different architectures of machines and we realised that aluminium is an area where current technologies really don’t do it service. It’s really hard to put in a laser based system, it’s highly reflective, so it actually costs more to print a piece of aluminium than it is to titanium, which is illogical, so anyone that wants aluminium basically just bulks at the price. It’s actually a low-cost material, so putting low-cost materials in high cost machines doesn’t make sense, but there’s a huge demand for it. Just open a car bonnet and look how much aluminium there is, or open your washing machine and have a look inside. There’s so much aluminium, but typically they’re parts that are dye cast, investment cast, [or made with] powder metallurgy. And if you look at how those guys are prototyping, and where they’re prototyping, they’re talking about 100, 200 parts. They don’t have a solution. The only other solutions they have are the powder bed additive systems that use binders but they’re all largely restricted because they’re either very high shrinkage or the metallurgy that they result in just cracks, it’s not fit for purpose. You’re not going to make a car engine prototype out of those sorts of alloys. So we felt there was a gap in the middle which is, can you make a high productivity aluminium machine that produces parts that are of a price point that you could say ‘I will make 100 of those, 200 of those but I’m not paying hundreds of dollars per part, I’m paying tens of dollars per part’? That was the rationale behind it.”
TCT: What kind of process will Stratasys' metal machines be based on and how large will they be?
PR: “They’re industrial machines. We’re not going into any discussions about the architecture or the process, but from the ground up it has been designed as a production solution, and that’s who we see the customer base being, it’s going to be production users. But these are users who are used to high cost capital assets, they’re companies who are used to dealing with metal powders, and the post processing and handling of those powders. Powder metallurgy is a huge global industry of which 3D printing is a very, very small part of it at the moment.”
Stratasys metals RAPID + TCT 2018
A selection of aluminium parts printed with Stratasys' metal AM technology.
TCT: You mentioned opening the car bonnet and seeing all the aluminium parts, are you looking at these applications and thinking there’s potential for those to be additively manufactured?
PR: “Our route in developing the technology has been one very much of collaborating with certain industry verticals. We have a series of partners that we’re developing this with, from the aerospace, automotive, defence industry, and the white goods industry. They’re very much driving the architecture of the system, they’re driving the metallurgy that comes off it, they’re driving the size and scale of the machine and the productivity, so it’s coming from their applications driving us to develop this thing. They know what they want. They are the customer, and again, I think it’s a shift in thinking that says 'we need to be more open about the way we develop technologies with our customers,' because we can’t second guess what they’re going to want.
"That’s part of the real benefit of being Stratasys. We’ve got this 30 years of legacy and trust which means these large corporations will enter into those types of partnerships with us, because they feel comfortable in doing that. And a lot of our technologies were developed that way. There’s an expectation from companies, and pressure isn’t a bad thing as long as you live up to it.”
'Let's look at what the process does rather than what the process is.'
TCT: How long has this technology been in development?
PR: “I couldn’t speak to how long people have been thinking about it or playing around in our labs, because I don’t know. There’s certainly been a concerted group working on this for the last three years, and it has been internally. It was Stratasys-initiated people out of the research group in Rehovot (a city in the central district of Israel) who traditionally are from an inkjet printing background.”
TCT: Why has the company decided to tease the industry with an announcement but no machine or process info?
PR: “Why not? [Laughs] Because it does raise questions about what can it do rather than what is it. And we’re keen to find some more out from beta partners to work with who are less focussed on ‘oh that’s a novel technology I want one’ because there is a lot of that in this industry and there is a lot of when something new comes out everybody races because they have to have one. Well, no, let’s challenge that thinking and say let’s look at what it does rather than what it is. It gives you a false sense of success. There’s a lot of machines and a lot of vendors out there who will purport to having fantastic sales but what they’ve done is sold one machine to lots of different research labs around the world. And then five years down the line when you actually question it and say how successful has your technology been? ‘Well we sold 100 in our first year’, but how much did you spend in the second year? ‘We sold 30’, hang on that’s not a successful business model. I’m sure this [Stratasys' metal 3D printing technology] would be of great interest to some metallurgy departments in universities around the world but it’s not what it's aimed at. It’s aimed at industries who want sizeable volumes of pre-production prototypes or even end use parts, where traditionally you would have made them by powder injection moulding, metal injection moulding, dye casting, but all those processes require really expensive tools, and what we’re doing is saying no, let’s cut out the tooling. You may still have some post processing that the powder metallurgy industry knows, but we do away with all that tooling.”
TCT: And when do you suppose we can expect to see a Stratasys metal AM machine in the flesh?
PR: “I’m not sure when you’ll see one in the flesh, but you will certainly hear a lot more about the process at IMTS towards the end of the year. I can’t say how much more detail we’ll go into but I would suspect by IMTS we will be a lot more open about the application space, the architecture of the machine, the process and how it works. At the moment we’re not being coy about it, I think we just feel we want to get people to think more about what a process does rather than what a process is. We’ve just got so tied up in these ASTM seven different ways of 3D printing, is it a laser, is it an extruder? And actually it doesn’t matter. What matters is what does it do? And what people want is just a cost effective, high quality, good metallurgy solution that gives them parts. Whether it does it by spreading chocolate with a knife, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter to the user. It matters from a ‘oh that’s innovative, or that’s not innovative, or that’s a 'me-too' technology, or not a 'me-too' technology.’ What I would say is the architecture is completely different to anything else on the market. And that’s what gives us our true USP, which is very high speed and very good metallurgy.”
