Innovative Tech Series | 3D Printing
00:00:08:24 - 00:00:40:09 Speaker 1 Well, good morning, everyone. We are welcoming you to our and NWTC northeastern Wisconsin Technical College Innovation Series. This is the fourth in our series of our innovation series where we are trying to bring new technologies that are emerging into the Northeast Wisconsin area and help folks learn more about them and how they might be applied for companies and for other other folks here in our region. 00:00:40:24 - 00:01:08:22 Speaker 1 We have a tremendous panel today. We are super excited about the resources that we've been able to bring together. And so this after this morning, we're going to just kind of get ready and start moving forward to talk about additive manufacturing. And we've got
some folks who are on the cutting edge and who are also out there using additive manufacturing on a regular basis to help deliver business results. 00:01:09:13 - 00:01:34:21 Speaker 1 So I think this is going to be a great opportunity for folks. We are recording as well. There is no chat function. So kind of doing that cleaning, doing the bits and pieces here.
There is no chat function, but if you have a question, please, please put that in the Q&A. The four speakers that we have lined up today are very excited to take your questions and interact with you and share their industry knowledge. 00:01:34:27 - 00:02:00:18 Speaker 1 So please, if you have any questions, put them in the Q&A. And when we're done with the four presentations, we will come back to those and hopefully get some great questions and get some even better answers. Fantastic. All right. So I am going to start sharing our title screen and I am going to introduce our first speaker. We are very excited to have David Ramirez.
00:02:00:27 - 00:02:10:12 Speaker 1 He is a marketing manager from R E 3D Tech and he's here to share his thoughts on additive manufacturing with us. Good morning, David. 00:02:11:19 - 00:02:30:00 Speaker 2 Good morning, Jill. Thank you for that introduction. And I'm here on behalf of the RE 3D Tech. I can start share my screen here with you guys. Can you see what? Can you see my screen? 00:02:30:21 - 00:02:32:20 Speaker 1 That looks perfect. David, go ahead.
00:02:33:00 - 00:02:58:03 Speaker 2 Perfect. So some of the things I'd like to share is as more of a general overview on some of the innovations that we've seen in the 3D printing industry, some of the opportunities that are out there in terms of applications and use for 3D printing. I have some cool videos to show you guys. Just a little background on 3D tech. 00:02:58:08 - 00:03:28:10 Speaker 2 Re 3D tech is additive manufacturing startup founded roughly six years ago by James Teuber. He started with one desktop 3D printer on his desk and he tells this this really funny story that he brought his wife and four kids into to the office when he opened up and he showed them what he was working on the last year.
00:03:28:10 - 00:04:02:10 Speaker 2 And his wife goes, That's it. Like, how are we going to pay our bills with this this little printer that's sitting on your desk? By fast forward to six years. We have dozens of printers, printers. You can't even wrap your arms around how big they are. We were recently acquired by private equity company as well. They're called core industrial partners, and they've created this platform with us as the first acquisition in a $700 million fund. 00:04:02:25 - 00:04:36:07 Speaker 2 And they are planning to just roll companies into this platform to create this big digital manufac shrink company. And we're rebranding hopefully by the end of May, we're going to
be called Aptiv Disrupt. That's a play on disruptive manufacture. So any ho let's get started on talking about 3D printing, and I'm not sure how well-versed some of the attendees are, so I thought I'd give a general overview on what additive manufacturing is. 00:04:37:02 - 00:05:08:06 Speaker 2 Additive manufacturing is essentially a manufacturing process that creates objects by adding successive layers of material. You're basically stacking pancakes on top of each other, so you get a 3D object. Now, 3D printing has been around since 50, 60 years and it all stems all the parts that are made by a 3D printer stem from a computer aided design.
00:05:08:07 - 00:05:34:24 Speaker 2 So a 3D model is required in order to create objects. Now we've had customers, potential customers send us pictures of a drawing they put on, they made on a napkin like the night before, and they submit this file with a request for a quote saying, Hey, can you print this for me? And my my feedback is always, yes, in theory, we could print that for you. 00:05:34:24 - 00:06:03:19 Speaker 2 But someone has to do the 3D modeling to take your napkin idea and bring it into the digital world. So a digital model is required to do 3D printing. One of the things that happens in the 3D printing process is we take that digital model and we actually slice it. We
slice it into all of the layers that are going to be stacked on top of each other. 00:06:04:06 - 00:06:33:22 Speaker 2 And that creates something called G code, which is which are the instructions for the 3D printer to lay down every layer. So not only do you need the 3D model to start with, but you also need what is called a slicer or some sort of software to slice that 3D model and create the instructions for the printer and that's that's what you send to the printer to create the object. 00:06:34:10 - 00:07:04:08 Speaker 2 So quick overview. There's more processes than I can speak to in 30 minutes, but just a quick overview on some of the 3D printing processes that are out there. We have photo polymerization. This is more of a resin based process. You basically have a pool of this
resin that is being cured layer by layer. And so once the layer is secured, it moves out of the way. 00:07:04:13 - 00:07:36:06 Speaker 2 Then you have a wet layer that gets cured again and is creating every successive layer that way. Material extrusion, better known as FDM, is probably the most popular version of 3D printing. That's what you'll see in most consumer 3D printers that just sit on
your desktop. It's sort of like the hot glue style of 3D printing. You're extruding material through a hot tip and layering each layer on, stacking each layer. 00:07:36:06 - 00:08:08:22 Speaker 2 On that way. Material jetting is similar to the ink printers that we see that all of us are familiar with that go back and forth and leave that paper soaking wet because they dropped a lot of ink droplets on the on the piece of paper. It basically works exactly
the same way. It's it's dropping powdered material as opposed to a resin or a filament of material. 00:08:08:22 - 00:08:48:01 Speaker 2 It's laying powdered material and you're curing it with agents or you're carrying it with with heat to form each each layer. Powder bed fusion works in a very similar way. A lot of times you'll see lasers in powder bed fusion, and that is how each layer is cured or formed. Multijet Fusion is a process where agents sort of like adhesives, for lack of
better words, are what are curing the layers and infusing them. 00:08:49:12 - 00:09:27:27 Speaker 2 Energy Direct Energy deposition resembles more welding where you have the material and energy being deposited to form each layer. Sheet lamination I'm not very familiar with, I'm sure maybe one of the the experts that we have on our panel can speak to that. Probably a less less popular method of 3D printing. So there's there's a little more to 3D printing than your average person would know. 00:09:28:06 - 00:10:20:04 Speaker 2 We've we've been in 3D printing, like I said, for six years now, and this business has grown substantially. We're now in this portfolio. We have over 140 employees. And when I joined
the team, we only had ten. So needless to say, the business has grown significantly, but there's more to 3D printing than just creating the part. As you can see here on the left side with the with the powder bed systems, once the parts are made, you have to basically go and dig up the parts through all the unused powder, and then you have to clear the powder off the part, get the powder out of any pockets that the part might have, clear holes 00:10:20:04 - 00:10:48:24 Speaker 2 and passages. And sometimes the customer requires the part to be a certain color, certain surface finish. So then there's additional processes that happen after the part is printed. You can see all the equipment down here, the HP equipment here, you have the printer, you have the build core, you have the cooling unit, you have the processing station to clear up all the powder.
00:10:48:24 - 00:11:24:17 Speaker 2 So there's a lot more to this than just uploading a part and hitting print. And likewise, likewise for the FDM or DMS processes, there's material or support material that needs to be removed. You can see this part, this metal part here has a lot of support material underneath it because it has sort of an overhang. So for processes like this, material needs to be
laid out ahead of time. 00:11:24:17 - 00:11:51:18 Speaker 2 If you're going to start a geometry three inches above the build plate. So there's a lot of work that goes into removing support material as well. And here off to the left, we have parts going into a center oven. So depending on the style of process that you're using to put these metal parts together, a lot of the times they won't be finished.
00:11:51:18 - 00:12:12:21 Speaker 2 They won't have the exact material properties that you're looking for. So you have to put them through some sort of heat cycle to have to get the layers to Fuze to get the material to adhere to each other and get the material properties that you're looking for. So there's a lot more than just printing. So take that into consideration.
00:12:12:21 - 00:12:40:04 Speaker 2 And when you get a quote back from us, there's more that we're accounting for than just making the part before you. So just a quick overview on some of the materials. I mean, at this point, it seems like there's virtually no limit to what you can print with. I've seen I've seen wood as I've seen 3D printers that can print it in with wood. 00:12:40:04 - 00:13:32:26 Speaker 2 Now, I've seen 3D printers that can print food, that can print, you know, human body parts. But we stick to just mechanical components here. For the most part, we focus on polymers and metals polymers. At this point, probably the easiest thing to 3D print with simply
because you can melt fuze that material pretty much any way you'd like metals is is where the industry still has some work to do in terms of the speed, the capacity for metal printing we can print right now, but it's very slow. 00:13:32:26 - 00:14:09:19 Speaker 2 The the quantity of parts that you can get out of one build is very limited still. That has to do with the technology of the equipment, the technology of the material. Ceramics is another one that's gaining popularity. You see that a lot in jewelry, research and development sculptures. Composites is one that I'm very excited about because that's sort of like
polymers and other filament based material. 00:14:10:09 - 00:14:56:11 Speaker 2 I'm very excited about that. You see, you see composites becoming more and more popular because they give you very high strength for a very lightweight part. And 3D printing lends itself to creating very lightweight parts. But to be able to go and supplement that,
that part with with filament of carbon fiber or filament of Kevlar like you see in this this part right here with a yellow filament that's Kevlar that's being used to reinforce this this component. 00:14:57:09 - 00:15:35:05 Speaker 2 So you're gaining a lot of a lot of strength and you're maintaining the lightweight design that you're able to achieve by 3D printing. So what are some of the advantages here in using 3D printing for one speed? If you had an idea, let's say 20, 30 years ago and you wanted to see this, this component wants to see this component come to life, how would you even go about that? 00:15:36:00 - 00:15:59:21 Speaker 2 Who would you call? Who would you contact in order to to create just an idea that you had? It would be very difficult. You would have to contact several people and then good luck trying to get them to take a take on your business of of just creating one component so that 3D printing offers a very low barrier to entry.
00:16:00:11 - 00:16:24:25 Speaker 2 All it requires is a 3D model really. So you have the 3D model, you can send it to a service bureau like us, or if you have your own desktop printer, you're really just sending the part to the printer and hitting print. So parts can be made in hours, if not days, as opposed to maybe a couple of weeks with more traditional methods. 00:16:26:05 - 00:16:52:12 Speaker 2 Not those methods are necessarily slow, but they require will either require, you know, maybe if you go to a C and C machine shop, you might have to wait in line because those things are only putting out, you know, one part at a time where oftentimes with the systems that we have, if there's extra space in the cube, we can throw your part in there with other orders that we're working on. 00:16:52:18 - 00:17:29:14 Speaker 2 And you can have your part overnight design freed up 3D printing basically virtually has no no constraints on your designs. And, you know, take that with a grain of salt because there are designs that won't necessarily create the final result you're looking for. But the
3D printer will put they'll it'll stack all those layers on top of each other, but you might not get the results that you were looking for, but you virtually have unlimited design freedom with 3D printing. 00:17:29:14 - 00:18:10:04 Speaker 2 Just look at this metal part that I have here. The the inside of it has a lattice structure you pretty much can't achieve with any other manufacturing process. The materials are they're constantly adding to the types of materials that are available for 3D printing. I know the resins have virtually unlimited, what would you call it, like the the chemical makeup of these resins is virtually unlimited.
00:18:10:15 - 00:18:39:04 Speaker 2 We were working with Loctite sometime last year and they basically said you can come that you can come to them with specific material properties that you're looking for and they'll custom make a resin that will print and and achieve those exact material properties that you were looking for. So highly, highly customizable in terms of material and in terms of your design as well. 00:18:39:19 - 00:19:05:04 Speaker 2 One of the beautiful, beautiful things about 3D printing is if you created a design, let's say an injection molding and you you created the tool to make the part and then you found out that there was a flaw in your design for you to go back and create those changes in the tooling is not always so easy, especially because you're removing material. 00:19:06:14 - 00:19:28:27 Speaker 2 It's much harder to add material to a piece of tooling if that's the sort of change that you need to make with 3D printing, you'll just go change the digital model and send it to the printer to make the new version of the part that that that you want. So that reduces a little bit of risk when it comes to prototyping. 00:19:29:09 - 00:20:14:27 Speaker 2 You're not having to commit to tooling and you know, not to knock on injection molding.
We now offer injection molding as well in our portfolio, but this is about the advantages of 3D printing, right? So when it comes to prototyping, a lot of people tend to lean towards 3D printing. Now because of that reduced risk, if if the part doesn't work out the way it was supposed to, you haven't committed to buying a big piece of tooling and the time that that takes so you can make iterations very quickly and of course that comes with cost savings as well. 00:20:14:27 - 00:20:53:09 Speaker 2 So how does how does 3D printing play a role in manufacture in businesses? For one, you can streamline your your recruitment network. This this example down here is a very good example of a component that required eight pieces to assemble. So you had to go purchase components from possibly eight different vendors. Then you had to bring them all in and you
had to put them in an assembly line to assemble each component. 00:20:54:13 - 00:21:31:04 Speaker 2 So this bracket, this all could have been achieved in a single piece when when using 3D printing, it created a part that is 40% lighter and 20% stronger. It's not always the best option. Obviously, if you're going to do mass production or super high volumes, but you can you can think about possibly the research and development stage, the testing stage, small production runs.
00:21:31:04 - 00:22:06:28 Speaker 2 You see that a lot with these electric vehicle launches. They're not they're not making 100,000 of these vehicles. They're maybe making 100, 300 or 500, 1000. So it doesn't require traditional methods of recruitment or manufacturing because you're not doing 100,000, you're not doing 500,000 or a million. So that allows companies to get to market faster. And I would I would
rephrase that and I would say get to solution, get to the solution faster. 00:22:07:19 - 00:22:37:09 Speaker 2 It's not always it's not always that you're trying to create an end use part. Sometimes you just need something down and dirty in your assembly line. You need to create a component that's going to help your assembly line move faster. So it's not always about the end use part, but getting to a solution faster. Whether you have a 3D printer at your facility or
you have someone like us nearby, you come up with an idea that's going to help your assembly line, that's going to help your workers. 00:22:38:00 - 00:23:02:22 Speaker 2 You can have that idea created in a matter of days. And one of the other advantages for the supply chain is reduction in inventory. So we see this with with parts that have been
out for a decade. Parts of the are towards the end of their life cycle. And the the new version of this product is coming out. 00:23:03:16 - 00:23:39:15 Speaker 2 But the company still has millions of these legacy products out there and they have to produce replacement components and they're not making one at a time. They have to make 10,000, 50,000 of them, put them in a storage unit or a warehouse until they're needed.
Well, with 3D printing, if you would, designed for these, have you taken that into consideration in the start of the development process? 00:23:41:03 - 00:24:16:09 Speaker 2 You could store your inventory digitally and print parts on demand for replacement and legacy components. So we see that a lot in vintage automobiles, vintage abodes or just consumer products that are no longer in production. Some people have made entire businesses on replacement components for consumer electronics that the OEMs are no longer making replacement parts for. So I think the next slide is a video. 00:24:16:25 - 00:24:22:09 Speaker 2 Let me see. Yes. So I'm going to play this video is a really cool case. 00:24:22:09 - 00:25:01:01 Speaker 3 When we first got the Mark Forge printer, I honestly didn't think it would be as good as it is, but really surpassed my expectations. We were trying to get a full robot set up
in our molding process, which takes thousands and thousands of parts per month. We typically preload each one of the parts in the tool manually. We're running it in a mold that has a running temperature of 275 degrees.
00:25:01:01 - 00:25:29:11 Speaker 3 So you're literally putting your hand right on a burner, basically. And I've had my son try it. He's got burned. I started off thinking, how do I make this not a robot? I figured, well, heck, I want to try an industrial machine. And we ended up getting like seven. I designed a fixture. I need to use a trigger mechanism, like a garden hose where you pull the trigger and it can release all eight pieces into the mold. 00:25:29:11 - 00:25:49:12 Speaker 3 I thought, Man, that's going to fail is going to get halfway through and power is going to go out, the machine is going to have a failure. I just thought now it's never going
to work. And I learned it all. It took 27 and a half hours and I was blown away. It worked. And this is literally the first my first iteration that I made. 00:25:49:26 - 00:26:16:24 Speaker 3 And we ended up running it like two days later in production, out on the floor and manually loading them versus putting them in with the clock. There's a good 15 second difference.
When we first started, we were doing 6000 manually and then after the clock was made up to 10,000 parts, today we literally did 50% more output in one day. 00:26:17:05 - 00:26:42:22 Speaker 3 And that's unbelievable. You know, something that would have taken us to three weeks to machine. I did it in two days. Faster cycle time, safer, more consistent power quality. Putting continuous fiber inside the parts is incredible. And there's just more and more applications that we find for it. And that's a good question to ask ourselves is what else
can we do with it? 00:26:42:22 - 00:27:09:10 Speaker 3 So that's watching this become an issue. But Mark Porges helped us get through the issues we have had. You have control of when you can get something, how it can be made, we can make it very useful, productive and helpful tools for not just us but our customers. It's very powerful. It's something that I'm constantly trying to find the little things to solve
that will add up to be a large benefit. 00:27:09:10 - 00:27:33:02 Speaker 3 And there's so many things that you can improve in a shop. You don't have a limit to what you can make. It's not going to be very costly and it won't take a lot of your time. You don't have to start with the square walk anymore. You can start from the ground up. When we.
00:27:33:02 - 00:28:16:19 Speaker 2 So yeah, I mean, really, really cool case study. Like I was saying, it's not always about the end use parts. It's not about trying to compete with traditional manufacturing methods because we oftentimes tell our customers that, hey, this 3D printing is not the right process for this kind of volume that you're planning on doing. Why don't we explore maybe
some soft tooling or, you know, something else, but to be able to do what these guys did at Zero Tolerance and just come up with an idea that's going to help your company put, you know, increase in output by 50%. 00:28:17:02 - 00:28:43:12 Speaker 2 And because of that low barrier to entry, all you need is a 3D model. You send this over to someone who can 3D print it for you and you you prove your concepts right away, you know, in a matter of days and in a matter of days, they they came up with a solution that reduced reduce this this one step in their process from 15 seconds to three. 00:28:44:04 - 00:29:17:10 Speaker 2 So really cool stuff that you can do with 3D printing. Some of some of the markets that we serve I listed on here consumer goods. Man. You'd be surprised that the stuff that
we see, we see replacement components for electronics, for headphones. We see a lot of panels like this, We see panels and, and housings for products that are that they're doing super low volumes for or custom. 00:29:17:10 - 00:29:53:11 Speaker 2 There's a lot of custom consumer products or electronics for photography or you name it. But there are, you know, they're a very niche market and they only need to make 100 or they're a startup as well and they're they're working their way where they're working the kinks out of their, their product. And additive manufacturing is perfect for them because they don't have the tool up, they don't have to deal with the stress of trying to think he's so many so far ahead, an advanced four.
00:29:54:02 - 00:30:32:07 Speaker 2 What are the possible changes that are going to come up later? They just they can take the changes as as they go. Automotive as I mentioned before, especially with all the electrification that's going on right now, hardly any of the OEMs are producing super, super high volume right now in terms of their electric their electric vehicles. So right now, 3D printing is is a very, very much a viable solution for these low production quantities in the automotive market.
00:30:33:14 - 00:31:04:24 Speaker 2 Health care is something I'm very excited about because one of one of the advantages that I mentioned before about 3D printing is it's highly customizable and very much like our friend fingerprints and no human, no, no body is exactly the same. So when it comes to prosthetics, when it comes to casts, you can make cars with 3D printing that are that fit like a glove for for the individuals. 00:31:05:18 - 00:31:49:12 Speaker 2 I don't know if many of you have heard of Smiledirectclub or what's the other one. I
forget the other one's name, but the Invisalign Invisalign is the other one. They create these transparent braces basically, that you put over your teeth, but the way they create those molds is by scanning the person's mouth, creating 3D models, and then they print each iteration in a 3D print, each iteration that this person is going to go through in the the moving moving of their teeth and they create the braces, the, you know, the transparent braces from each one of those molds. 00:31:49:22 - 00:32:33:04 Speaker 2 So without that, without 3D printing, you don't have Invisalign and least not to to the volume and to the amount of people that it's helping. So that's, I think, a big, big
industry for 3D printing is going to be health care, aerospace. You're always fighting to make something as strong and as lightweight as possible and with the advantages that 3D printing offers, I can, you know, sky's the limit, pun intended, for for aerospace, because you can always make parts stronger and you can always find a way to remove material. 00:32:33:04 - 00:33:16:15 Speaker 2 I think I have one more video after this to kind of show where 3D printing is headed. The video that I that I have is a piece metal 3D printing that they have that just came to market. And one of the one of the things that really propelled the 3D printing industry
was a piece approach to plastic and how you can have this cube, this print envelope and however many parts you can fit into this cube that printer will print in a matter of 15, 16 hours. 00:33:17:15 - 00:33:54:05 Speaker 2 So that has lend itself to 3D printing, competing in some of this mass production, our low volume production for end use parts and of course adding adding speed to prototyping as well. So now I'm excited that this is going to be introduced into the metal market, which is where I think this really takes off. If we can produce metal components with complex geometries at a at a quick pace with a competitive price. 00:33:54:07 - 00:34:05:10 Speaker 2 And I think 3D printing is really going to cement itself as a manufacturing process that's here for a very long time. So let's jump into that video. 00:34:06:03 - 00:34:07:06 Speaker 3 By leveraging and.
00:34:07:06 - 00:34:09:15 Speaker 2 Extending HP Multijet Fusion. 00:34:09:15 - 00:34:12:22 Speaker 3 Technology for printing the 3D plastics. A HP. 00:34:12:22 - 00:34:17:18 Speaker 2 Metal jet can propel your business forward with the most advanced metals 3D. 00:34:17:18 - 00:34:43:01 Speaker 3 Printing technology for mass production. Get ready to take on new jobs and unlock new revenue
streams inside the printer. The carriage features six print heads arranged across two print bars up to four different nozzles can print HP binding agents in the same 21 micron grid on the powder bed, providing four times the nozzle redundancy. The printing process. 00:34:43:01 - 00:34:44:11 Speaker 2 Starts by spreading. 00:34:44:11 - 00:35:12:07 Speaker 3 A layer of the metal powder. Then HP metal jet binding agent is jetted and precise locations
onto the powder bed to define the geometry of single or multiple parts. The energy source helps evaporate liquid components and cure the material once printing and encountering processes are complete, high strength green part is removed from the build unit and sintered using an industry standard sintering solution. 00:35:13:10 - 00:35:15:16 Speaker 3 The loose powder is recovered from the HP. 00:35:15:16 - 00:35:26:03 Speaker 2 Middle jet powder removal station and transferred to the HP Metal Jet Powder Management Station, where it is automatically mixed, received and loaded into another build unit for the next job. 00:35:26:20 - 00:35:33:04 Speaker 3 HP Metal jet brings through the productivity, quality and cost constraints of existing 3D printing.
00:35:33:04 - 00:35:34:18 Speaker 2 Technologies for metals. 00:35:35:04 - 00:35:36:24 Speaker 3 Compared to the alphabet fusion. 00:35:36:26 - 00:35:40:03 Speaker 2 HP Metal jet produces more isotropic grain structure. 00:35:40:07 - 00:35:47:06 Speaker 3 In the sintered heart, resulting in more uniform material properties compared to metal injection molding. 00:35:47:15 - 00:35:52:03 Speaker 2 HP Metal jet technology eliminates the time consuming D binding process.
00:35:52:12 - 00:36:04:01 Speaker 3 Freeing up to 20 hours from your workflow. Now you can accelerate innovative designs and products and efficiently produce high quality 3D metal parts at scale. 00:36:04:28 - 00:36:09:12 Speaker 2 Get ready to experience unlimited capabilities. 00:36:09:12 - 00:36:16:23 Speaker 3 HP Metal Jacks Reinvent opportunities.
00:36:16:23 - 00:36:33:04 Speaker 2 So that's that's basically it. Feel free to take a picture of this if you want to reach out to us. Doesn't hurt to just have a conversation on the phone either. We could help you just brainstorm some, some some of your workflows or thoughts. 00:36:33:23 - 00:37:08:19 Speaker 1 Awesome. Thank you so much, David. That was a fantastic overview. We really appreciate that. One of our and our final speaker is actually going to be from HP. So I think she appreciated some of the the technology you're sharing there. That was exciting to see. And
I love the video of the company in Michigan. You know, that feels real close to home here up in Wisconsin in terms of, you know, folks using these solutions, using 3D printing to find solutions that can, you know, almost double the productivity of that work center. 00:37:09:12 - 00:37:37:02 Speaker 1 That's exciting. So fantastic. Appreciate that. Next, we have a from the Milwaukee School
of Engineering right here in Wisconsin. We have one of their professors in engineering, Vincent Winter, who's going to be sharing more with kind of what's on the cutting edge with prototyping and design. So, Vince, thank you so much. Feel free to introduce yourself a little more, but we we look forward to you sharing more information.
00:37:37:03 - 00:37:37:18 Speaker 1 Thanks. 00:37:38:04 - 00:38:04:01 Speaker 4 Thanks, Jill. Appreciate the opportunity to share my screen real quick here. Give me a quick segue. Here we go. See my screen. Okay, Jill, I'm assuming you said it was great. 00:38:04:27 - 00:38:06:16 Speaker 1 Yeah, perfect. Okay. 00:38:06:27 - 00:38:39:01 Speaker 4 Great. Well, as Jill said, I'm Vincent Winter, director of Milwaukee School of Engineering's Rapid Prototyping Consortium. Start off a little bit about me to understand my background.
I've been here at Mystery for 19 years. I did start off my career in traditional manufacturing, my background. I actually started off in a two year school Marine Park Technical College, part of the Wisconsin Technical College System, where I obtained a 200 degree. 00:38:39:02 - 00:39:04:15 Speaker 4 I went on to complete my apprenticeship in tool and die, focusing on injection molding, casting, stampings, etc.. Then I came to MSA. We finished my bachelor's degree in finance while I was here and just fell in love really, with the additive manufacturing industry. It's it's a fantastic industry box of opportunity for creativity, lots of opportunity to really make a difference in the world.
00:39:05:22 - 00:39:37:14 Speaker 4 Heavily involved in the industry. I've served on the board of the additive Manufacturing Users Group since 2012. It's the largest users conference for the additive manufacturing industry. For any of you users out there, I a I highly recommend you check this group out. It's pretty phenomenal as far as opportunities to share thoughts, ideas, best practices, etc. I also serve on the advisory board for Saint Louis University, Center for Manufacturing and on the board for the photo Polymer Additive Manufacturing Alliance.
00:39:37:14 - 00:39:53:21 Speaker 4 So quite a bit of industry involvement and that's one of the things I really enjoy about my position here at Emissaries is we're really it's that's part of the role is to be involved in the industry and kind of bring that back to our members. So a little bit about him is we got to do a little pitch right. 00:39:54:15 - 00:40:21:06 Speaker 4 Missouri Private University founded in 1903, downtown here in beautiful Milwaukee, Wisconsin, approximately 2800 students, 16 bachelor's degrees, 11 master's degrees. We're best known for our engineering degrees, but we've have a phenomenal nursing program and in a spectacular business school as well. Ranked among the best in the Midwest from the Princeton Review. So for any you folks out there that have kids going to college, I highly recommend you check it out. 00:40:21:24 - 00:40:24:27 Speaker 2 I went to MSU. We actually I recommend it as well.
00:40:25:07 - 00:40:45:11 Speaker 4 Where we even get a couple on one of our next speaker. Steve is also an proud Missouri alum, so we've been very involved in the additive manufacturing industry and that's kind of an element of pride really, that I think Missouri's made a huge impact on the industry from being kind of a small private engineering university in the upper Midwest here. 00:40:46:03 - 00:41:08:10 Speaker 4 I think we've we've had an outsized impact on the industry, which is exciting and and kind of a source of pride for us. So a little bit about the Rapid Prototyping Center. We're a little over 30 years old now. We started in 1990, 1991 with a 50% matching grant from the NSF and being a small, privately held university. 00:41:08:10 - 00:41:31:00 Speaker 4 The President at that time, I told our Dean of applied research, Hey, that's great. You
got to have the money now go find the other half. So I always like to joke about that. You know, there's a saying that necessity is the mother of invention, and I believe it certainly was in this case as well. We've always had a lot of close ties with with local industry. 00:41:31:00 - 00:41:49:18 Speaker 4 And so our dean at the time reached out to a couple of of corporate partners and said, Hey, guys, there's this new technology coming out called Stereolithography. We think it's going to be important. We think it's going to be a game changer in the world. We'd like to get involved. We'd like you guys to get involved, so we'd like you to chip in.
00:41:49:18 - 00:42:19:03 Speaker 4 We need your help. So each of the four initial founding companies each chipped into a certain percentage, and that allowed us to acquire our first SLA to 50 back in 1991, which really gave birth to the concept to the consortium. But since then it's it's expanded to over 40 companies. But really our mission is kind of stayed the same in that that mission is to help our members develop and integrate custom atom, atom additive manufacturing solutions into their operations. 00:42:19:13 - 00:42:46:26 Speaker 4 So really our goal is to help our consortium members firstly stay aware of new developments in the industry, then disseminate these new developments and finally integrate them into their operations in ways that add value. We're standing by for professional staff members,
full time staff members and about 15 to 20 emissaries, student interns, mixtures of grad students, undergrad students we hire from any discipline. 00:42:46:26 - 00:43:16:13 Speaker 4 We feel that additive manufacturing has the opportunity to really touch all aspects of of industry, of professionals. And so we are agnostic on which disciplines we hire from. So here you'll see examples of our of our consortium members. And one of the unique things when when this consortium was started, it's a non compete consortium. And what that
means is that existing members have veto power over new members if they feel they're a direct competitor. 00:43:16:21 - 00:43:38:12 Speaker 4 Now the reason for that, it's not that we don't take a proprietary nature of these profiles very seriously because we do. It's the fact that all of our members are always invited to come down to our facilities, test out new equipment in a hands on way, do part reviews, design reviews, etc. and we want to eliminate any possibility of somebody inadvertently seeing a competitor's part. 00:43:38:24 - 00:44:04:02 Speaker 4 We also want our consortium members to be willing to talk to each other freely, compare wins, compares losses, kind of share knowledge. And that's really where we sit is kind of an informational conduit amongst our members in non related industries. So it makes for
a wide variety of use cases of demands as far as performance, esthetics, etc., different applications. 00:44:04:12 - 00:44:28:04 Speaker 4 And the other unique thing is it allows us to kind of transfer information from non-related industries. So things we information we glean from, from working on a project in one industry we can share with another industry without fear of our consortium members losing a competitive advantage. So again, a little bit of the mission of the consortium to provide deliverable value
to our industrial consortium members. 00:44:28:29 - 00:44:54:11 Speaker 4 That's huge. We really take that seriously, especially deliverable value aspect. We provide parts and solutions, but I think with each of our projects we also try to deliver a little bit of consultative type knowledge. So our with two main goals, anytime a project comes
in, one is to solve our consortium members problems and two is to educate them and kind of make them a little bit more of a sophisticated customer. 00:44:55:01 - 00:45:17:07 Speaker 4 The second mission is to train the additive manufacturing of professionals of tomorrow. And like I said earlier, in the talk, we're very proud of the fact that we've had a big impact on and kind of spreading the seeds of additive manufacturing experts around the industry. When you look at the amount of MSE alumni that have made an impact on our industry,
that that's pretty compelling. 00:45:18:15 - 00:45:47:19 Speaker 4 So then to provide additive manufacturing industry with the voice of the customer, it's rather unique that we have such a diverse noncompete consortium and what we found is that that provides a lot of value to OEMs when they're trying to understand what does the industry need. So we get involved in a lot of beta programs, testing out new equipment, new hardware, new materials, new software, and we can test it out on such a wide variety of different industries.
00:45:47:19 - 00:46:12:10 Speaker 4 It provides a tremendous amount of value in terms of voice, customer applications, testing, operational feedback back to the OEMs, and then finally to provide industry faculty with the professional development opportunities and support as well as our student population. Again, when we do projects here at MSA, we I think we take it one step further than a lot of universities. 00:46:13:13 - 00:46:47:11 Speaker 4 We always push our students and our faculty to really understand and articulate the value proposition of additive manufacturing. So really any project we do, whether it's for our consortium or internal for our industry community, our goal is to not only solve the problem, but also add a bit of an educational solution to it. So providing value to the consortium And why would companies want to join our consortium? 00:46:47:20 - 00:47:22:20 Speaker 4 One, it's kind of a unique aspect and really it goes back to our initial challenge in solution, and that's providing shared access to a world class additive manufacturing services and expertise. So it's a way for companies to kind of pay a portion of what they would have to to get access to this equipment. And then that not only provides them access to the
deliverables coming off that equipment, but access to test out that equipment, to come down, to understand the operational considerations, to talk to unbiased operators of the equipment, etc.. 00:47:23:29 - 00:47:49:15 Speaker 4 Secondly, helping our members develop additive manufacturing applications that add value to their operations. So when we when a new member joins, we really get to understand what their challenges are, what their operations are, what their needs are, and then help kind guide them through the path of where additive manufacturing can add value. There's a ton of demand out there and a ton of interest, and we're blessed to have that in the additive manufacturing space. 00:47:49:15 - 00:48:27:09 Speaker 4 But at the end of the day, for it to add sustainable value, it comes down to finding those applications where it saves money for the company, saves time, etc.. So then providing members with
early access to newly released release technologies, as David said, there is a plethora of new materials coming on the market, new technologies, new solutions, new solutions for printing, for post-processing, for pre-processing softwares, etc. And it's kind of keeping our members aware of what's coming in this market space and allowing them to test it out early. 00:48:28:05 - 00:48:50:29 Speaker 4 And then finally, professional development resources. We also put on five meetings a year where we bring compelling new technologies in to talk to our members, and our members are invited to send their employees down. They get continuing education credits as well
as hopefully a great awareness of of of new technologies that can make a difference in their operations. 00:48:52:20 - 00:49:14:17 Speaker 4 Then I want to talk a little bit about barriers to adoption being in the educational community. I hear a lot about this kind of being a bridge between education and additive manufacturing. Folks are always saying, What are the biggest barriers to adoption and this is a little bit of a soapbox for me, but I wanted to do something a little bit different maybe than all the other speakers.
00:49:14:17 - 00:49:43:17 Speaker 4 I know we've got a lot of speakers on here today, and so I like to talk a little bit about hype versus value. So what I've got here is two applications from the same company. Both were made for for Wilson, the one here, the airless basketball, not sure how many folks saw this, and it was probably an exciting engineering challenge to get a elastomeric material without any air to bounce and feel like a basketball. 00:49:44:28 - 00:50:22:12 Speaker 4 But when I look at it and I'm always very value focused, like how does this application add value? And so I struggled to understand how an airless basketball adds value intrinsically and why you would want to use one. You know, growing up in the upper Midwest, I'll tell you what, basketball's always seemed to be a puddle magnet. Anytime you're playing on
the courts and gosh, a lot of structured basketball like this, first time it goes in the mud, it's going to be awful difficult to wipe it off when your sweatshirt so it doesn't perform better than a basketball. 00:50:22:12 - 00:50:47:10 Speaker 4 The biggest solution that I've heard it solves is the lack of air, but it increases the cost of shipping. It's an expensive part to build because there's a lot of wasted volume inside. It's not in my and professional opinion, an effective use of additive manufacturing. Now,
if we take a look at the other side, again, another Wilson project, their paddle ball rack, it's made by another company. 00:50:47:10 - 00:51:11:03 Speaker 4 And what I like about the paddle ball rackets is because it articulates a value proposition. There's an issue and I've last time played paddle ball was 25 years ago back in high school, but it is the fastest growing sport in the world, I'm told. And one of the key issues that folks complain about, neighbors complain about around paddle ball courts is the noise. 00:51:11:12 - 00:51:36:02 Speaker 4 And the noise can have significant decibels and be very loud and disruptive, especially these these complexes. Now they're being developed with numerous courts, a lot of complaints
from the noise. And so what they were able to do using a complex lattice structure is really it reduced the noise significantly while increase the performance of the ball coming off the racket. 00:51:36:02 - 00:51:59:26 Speaker 4 And so, you know, when I look at this and I think what we need to do to really increase adoption of additive manufacturing is move away from kind of the hype projects that don't articulate the value that just are there because it's cool. You know, this area, this basketball
was, I believe, debut during the dunk contest at the NBA All-Star Game, which is great. 00:51:59:26 - 00:52:20:23 Speaker 4 It's cool, but it doesn't help folks understand the right way to look at additive to add value to their operations. Now, the paddle ball racket, you know, you can articulate some engineering tools and some value proposition that make this a better product in the long run, and that's what I like about it. So I want to talk a little bit about adding value with additive. 00:52:20:23 - 00:52:47:12 Speaker 4 This is this is kind of the biggest things that we're asked oftentimes and and I hope this helps a lot of the listeners out there. Everybody is excited about additive. But the
biggest challenge is, okay, now I'm excited. Where do I go with it? How do I look around my factory floor and find things that make sense? And so a couple of the key characteristics and again, some of this is a little bit redundant, David really touched on this. 00:52:47:24 - 00:53:16:06 Speaker 4 You know, weight savings, weight savings is great, right? And sometimes folks, you know, they talk about that, but weight savings only matters if it adds value to your design. Okay.
Think of aerospace. Think of and I love the the the jigs and fixtures. One big, big movement in the manufacturing space is COBOL Arts. Gosh, I was down at A.S. last year and I don't think there was a boost without a cobalt in it anywhere. 00:53:16:22 - 00:53:41:22 Speaker 4 Now the challenge with anything with robotics is you pay based on payload and performance and so weight equals value. So I think when we look at places, our manufacturer can add a lot of value in the future. It's robotic and defectors labor and we touched on that a little bit as well. You know, not only the manual labor aspect of it, but there is a
skilled labor shortage. 00:53:41:22 - 00:54:03:00 Speaker 4 You know, like David said, that, you know, years ago you would have to go to your local machine shop or model shop and have folks produce a model for you. Those are far and few between, unfortunately, and they're very busy. And so it's it's a way to automate some skilled labor performance. You know, we've touched on that with with the example of the
rackets. 00:54:03:11 - 00:54:29:08 Speaker 4 If you can do a better design that adds performance to whatever you're trying to accomplish through complexity, that adds value, You think of the GE fuel nozzle, that's a prime example of getting better flow, which equals better fuel economy. That's a way to add performance time to market. Again, we touched on this China market is huge. Depending on what industries you're in, it affects everyone. 00:54:30:06 - 00:54:50:20 Speaker 4 What certain industries, certainly more than others, cost, cost. I put down low a little bit because, you know, one of the things that when we when we get a new company in or a new group of engineers and they bring to us maybe a plastic injection molded part and they say, hey, we'd like to, we'd like to we'll explore using additive to produce this.
00:54:50:20 - 00:55:12:13 Speaker 4 And I look at it and I can tell it's already being molded. They say, Look, do you guys have tooling or ready for this? And they say, Yes, we do. And what's wrong with the part you have now? What are you trying to accomplish? Well, we'd like we'd like to produce it cheaper 99% of the time. 99.99% of the time.
00:55:12:13 - 00:55:43:09 Speaker 4 That's going to be a fool's errand because additive manufacturing is one of the most expensive manufacturing processes on the planet, largely. And so if you're just looking at piece part savings for our specialty, for a product that's already tooled, you're going to most likely be disappointed. You've got to take more of a holistic view on it. It doesn't mean it's a it's it's a nonstarter, but you have to have another problem you're trying to solve beyond just a 10% cost reduction in an already tooled part.
00:55:43:22 - 00:56:00:15 Speaker 4 You've got to look, is there a maintenance issues would you like to redesign it? Is there inventory issues, those kinds of things? And that ties right into our next one. Inventory management. Again, I won't touch on this a whole lot. David, I thought did a great job articulating it. Let's get right down to design risk or serial production.
00:56:01:04 - 00:56:29:24 Speaker 4 We've got companies that make products that are very low volume products, heavily tied to the to the sensor and optics industry. Those products exchange quite frequently. And it's they're always on a design risk because they've got low value components that hold high value components that change frequently. And so when you have something like that and you've got a high risk of design change, the risk of investing in tooling becomes in it cost prohibitive. 00:56:30:27 - 00:56:53:12 Speaker 4 So the ability to maybe pay a little bit more for a part, but not have yourself tied to a more expensive component in the future makes a lot of sense. Or as to serial production,
you see a lot of that in the medical industry. The theater liners David mentioned, medical jigs, fixtures, etc. all great examples of keys to adoption. 00:56:53:12 - 00:57:19:03 Speaker 4 There's a couple keys to kind of put in your back pocket. Just because you can print anything doesn't mean you should print everything. I tell this to our students all the time, added manufacturing is a manufacturing process, right? And it is just like any other manufacturing process. You need to design for it. And because it's expensive. Which leads to my second one,
you have to articulate the value proposition of each part of your design. 00:57:19:06 - 00:57:59:16 Speaker 4 You know, we've got unlimited design freedom, but that doesn't mean it's a good excuse to be a lazy designer. I would go the other direction and say, additive manufacturing forces you to really tighten up your designs to the point where you can articulate what each part of your design is doing. And that's one of the key components we try to drive home when working on student projects or helping their students understand how to use additive appropriately, and then learning the opportunities and limitations of each process, Each of these different additive manufacturing processes that David went through the each of their own pros and cons, limitations, etc. And when you can understand each one of those, 00:57:59:16 - 00:58:29:13 Speaker 4 you can understand where it can add value and where it can bring solutions to the table.
And I would even say it's it's it's important to understand the competitive process is, you know, cashier or things blow molding, seeing sea water jetting forming, etc., because then you really understand what those processes do well and what they struggle with. And if they're struggling with it, that's a good opportunity to look at additive and then finally partner with the pragmatic expert.
00:58:30:12 - 00:58:57:21 Speaker 4 You know, we've got some great resources here on this, this webinar for you guys. I think that this is a rapidly changing industry and you want somebody that you can trust, you want somebody that can guide you, keep you aware of updates in the in the in the industry and help you understand where you can add value internally so that I will move on to the next presenter and I look forward to the discussion in the future. 00:58:58:28 - 00:59:15:04 Speaker 1 Awesome. Thank you so much, Vince. Appreciate that. Great focus on value. Next up, we have Steve Grindle from Midwest Prototyping right here in Wisconsin down in Madison. Steve, we look forward to your presentation. 00:59:15:09 - 00:59:42:18 Speaker 2 Thanks, Jill. Thanks for putting this together. It's great to be here today. I'm sorry I had
a minor technical difficulty, but it looks like I got back on just in time, so let me share the screen here and. All right. Can you see that? 00:59:42:28 - 00:59:45:09 Speaker 1 There we go. Perfect. Thank you so much. 00:59:45:09 - 00:59:46:06 Speaker 2 It's it's. 00:59:46:06 - 00:59:46:19 Speaker 1 In there. 00:59:47:25 - 01:00:15:24 Speaker 2 So as Jill mentioned, I'm from Midway. I was prototyping in Blue Mountains, Wisconsin,
just outside of Madison. See if we can. There we go. So we say that our mission is to connect great ideas with innovative technologies. And the way we look at this, we look at our customers and the users of 3D printing as having the great ideas. 01:00:16:11 - 01:00:41:22 Speaker 2 It's our job to focus on the technology, to be experts in the technology and really be able to guide you in getting whatever you're trying to accomplish. And in David and have given some great examples of all the different areas that this technology can impact. So so we really focus on that side of it just, you know, providing the expertise with the technology and letting you come up with the great ideas.
01:00:43:15 - 01:01:13:19 Speaker 2 These terms get thrown around a lot and we see rapid prototyping as, you know, helping people develop, new products iterate very quickly. And then we see additive manufacturing is really using that same technology of 3D printing to make parts that go out in the real world and are used in some fashion, in some fashion and resold or, you know, used to to accomplish a specific purpose on a longer term, a little bit about Midwest. 01:01:13:19 - 01:01:40:06 Speaker 2 So I'll go through these slides really quickly because I know we've got a lot to get through here today, but we were established in 2001, as has been mentioned earlier. I want to I so we in the very early days of them having their first SLA machine. So I learned about
the technology there and then later started Midwest in 2001, a couple of years ago, similar to David's story, we were acquired by a private equity firm and we operate under the prototype group now. 01:01:40:06 - 01:02:09:27 Speaker 2 So there's, I think, nine different locations across the country doing everything from C and C manufacturing. You're seeing some machining sheet metal. And then we brought the additive manufacturing part of the equation to that group. So as I mentioned, we're in Blue Mountain,
Wisconsin. We've got on the additive side, we've got facilities in Colorado and Pennsylvania and then a couple other locations here locally that we've we've grown out of our original space. 01:02:09:27 - 01:02:35:22 Speaker 2 We run six different additive technologies and we'll go through those really quick. I think we're like 52 printers right now across the different locations and, you know, always looking to add to that. But 70 full time staff on the additive side prototype as a whole I think is about 350 people. We right now are printing about 32,000 parts a month out of our facility here in Bloomington.
01:02:35:22 - 01:03:00:29 Speaker 2 So a lot of variety, very diverse customer base, and that's what makes it fun. We get to see a lot of different things from the people we deal with every day. So this is a little bit of insight on that. You know, last couple of years we've worked with about
800 different companies each year and they're everything from automotive and health care on down the list here. 01:03:01:09 - 01:03:39:03 Speaker 2 A lot of food processing applications coming these days, a lot of lab instrumentation scientific devices, medical devices. Motorsports is a big area for us. And then just, you know, manufacturing their manufacturing obviously covers a lot of different basins. But David alluded earlier to, you know, jigs and fixtures and manufacturing floor, and he showed that great video. So it's a lot of that kind of stuff that that is, you know, maybe not the
sexiest side of 3D printing, but, boy, it really makes a difference to the bottom line and helps people get things done. 01:03:39:03 - 01:04:02:12 Speaker 2 So here's a few pictures of various projects over the years. David and Vince will certainly relate to this, but the problem with this industry is everything's confidential and you can't show anything until it's basically outdated. But but it is fun to to be able to show some things from time to time. Our in-house technologies and there's a lot of information here so I can go through these really quickly.
01:04:02:12 - 01:04:30:18 Speaker 2 But the point is that for us, there's no one one printer fits all right? I mean, there are a lot of different technologies and materials and approaches out there. And and David covered some of that on his slides. We find that as we grow our customer base and grow that diversity, we need different approaches all the time. And that's how the business has grown over the last 22 years, I guess. 01:04:32:02 - 01:04:56:09 Spea
2023-04-23 02:31
