The Secret to Solving O&G Supply Chain Pressure

[Music] let me say hello and uh welcome to our next develop virtual uh today well virtual just to give you a little bit of background is velo 3ds application deep dive so this is where we look into the details around different applications or different parts that leverage the latest and additive manufacturing technologies today is going to be a little bit different though and i'm going to explain that to you in a second i want to draw your attention to this part over here on the slide parts like this part so this is imi cci's high pressure flow control element these parts take full advantage of am everything that you'd expect they've got complex geometries they've got lightweight designs and they're extremely strong and at imicci parts like this have been at the center of entirely new business units designed to find solutions for customers in the flow control area but we're not going to talk about that today we're not going to go into the into the design of the part it's an amazing part you can learn more about it if you'd like today we're going to talk about what happens after you prove the concept after you've got this part it's fully designed everything's ready to go what do you do then like oil and gas or nuclear power a significant challenge is qualifying am technology and then competing with the volumes of data present for conventional manufacturing these industries rely on decades of material development and the transition to am requires a careful consideration in some cases new standards and then also you're going to need a scaled global supply chain so how do you resolve that let me say it's my honor to introduce our speakers today uh steve freitas is the director of new product development at imrcci steve has over 25 years of experience in the design selection and application of high pressure and high temperature valves in fossil power plants and oil and gas facilities his r d team has over 10 years of experience in development and installation of am parts at cci so specifically additive parts the r d team has developed several new valve designs using am they've worked with energy market customers all over the globe uh to validate these components for their applications and they've installed hundreds of parts in applications with pressures up to 4000 psi and temperatures up to 1100 fahrenheit so lots of real world experience with additive parts and then of course we also have zach walton today with us zach is our director of technical business development at vallo 3d before joining velo3d uh zach worked at multiple positions at halliburton energy services ranging from r d engineer to product manager he holds a bs and an ms in mechanical engineering from texas a m and has over 70 granted patents so a great audience for you today uh and steve i'm going to turn over to you all right thank you michael i'll talk about a little bit about imi cci and the cci valve design so imi cci provides specialized control valve designs that improve the reliability and efficiency of fossil nuclear and oil and gas facilities the imi design drag design controls fluid velocity within the valve and prevents problems with erosion noise and vibration and the heart of the design is the special flow control element which has torches flow pastors which break up the pressure drop and reduce velocity as fluid passes through the valve now the way we manufacture these parts is we take two dimensional plates and we create two-dimensional flow paths the picture on the left shows a flow path where the flow path zigzags back and forth in the horizontal plane the picture below shows how we take a stack of plates and make flow paths zigzag up and down instead of a sandwich arrangement these discs are brace unitized into a single assembly and the drag designs are engineered for each application we have over 10 000 legacy designs in our database and materials include 316 410 in canal 718 and tungsten carbide we make these ports in a huge range of sizes from parts you can hold in your hand like this little stack right here two parts that are six seven feet tall which go inside condenser dump devices like the pictures on the right so huge range of sizes engineered to order for engineer energy customers around the world about 10 years ago we began experimenting with a laser powder bed fusion for making these parts we started this in 2008 and we started shipping parts in 2009. our goal at that time was to improve full control accuracy of the very very small disk decks like the kinds you can hold in your hand because these have a critical impact on the process controls inside some of power plants our process was pretty simple design apart build a part see what came out flow tested and see what happened and at that time we had a lot of challenges we could not but our legacy designs without re-engineering our legacy designs use flat overhangs like the picture in the top right when you try to build parts and additive with flat overhangs it's an enormous challenge and you get these kind of bubbly drop out features due to the unsupported upper surface we really lack knowledge on the process limitations of am at that time and the parts as a result did not always meet our expectations for performance or cost there was a real hit or miss onesie twozy approach to development in shipping parts and customers we made it work but it wasn't satisfactory and then in 2017 we conducted a complete re-engineering of the parts around the limitations and optimization for laser powder grid fusion it was a sort of a dfam designed for additive manufacturing approach and this was really a huge change for us which improved our performance cost and lead time it showed us how to make parts that were consistent and um really has been a big change to our business since we've shipped over 500 parts and are starting to phase our legacy processes for many sizes of valves for bigger size valves we started again from scratch and this picture on the right shows two disc stacks both are made from inconel 718 these disc decks are used in power plants which operate up to 100 degrees fahrenheit or 600 degrees celsius typical size of this range of products is from four inch to 20 inch the two on the right are five inch nominal disc decks both are designed for the same performance envelope and the same dimensions but with am and the power of am and design for am approach that we created we're able to reduce the volume of the part on the right the am part by 25 this really lets us use am in a much broader range of applications than we could in the past we validated the design through cfd flow testing fea and load testing and the reduction in am court volume and subsequently cost and the massive lead time improvements we can get with am facilitated a changeover of our legacy parts to am technology across the board throughout the business we have many of these parts in the field right now we're currently limited to a 10 inch part size we'd like to make this much larger in the future and in fact just this week we're talking about making a 14 inch size disk stack which is an enormous piece of metal in am and the way we validate the design is actually quite simple we are a manufacturer of valves that control flow so the picture on the left is our technician loading up a disc deck in a flow test configuration where we blow air through the valve and measure its flow performance and the picture on the right shows us taking an am disk stack putting it between a hydraulic press loading it up and measuring deflection we want to make sure with am that the new part designs have equal or superior performance in terms of both flow and structural integrity so we can exchange legacy designs for am parts and give our customers the benefit of am2 but with am we can do much more than the extendable disk stacks we can take advantage of the um full capabilities to make things we couldn't make before we can make parts that are geometrically complex but also strong and lightweight so this example one of these parts this is a drag element which is used inside a ball valve the drag element is the elliptical piece on the left it's about 18 inches across eight inches tall eight inches deep it's a really large am part it was uh manufactured with laser powder bed fusion it was integrated into the valve assembly on the right so that picture shows the drag element combined with a traditional drilled hole element installed inside a 24 inch 900 glass ball valve so we can now do things with a valve performance we couldn't do before we can make valves which have had sort of traditional legacy performance characteristics perform much better give our customers more value and help their plants run more reliably and efficiently we also recognize that with am we're no longer restricted to just making the disk stack design that we make in our drag valves uh this has been a transformative idea at imicci we've built a new business unit around helping customers find flow control solutions with am technology the picture here shows two different am parts the one on the left is a typical cage or disc deck design which might go into a c-shape valve or even a competitor's valve as a retrofit where you take out the legacy part and you put in a new part fits in the same envelope but has much higher flow performance characteristics much better reliability and the part on the right is quite special we can actually have a valve or elbows in place and install multi-stage compact flow control elements inside a valve or inside a flow elbow someplace and control velocity and prevent damage and erosion in applications we haven't pursued before so that's been a huge change for us but with am comes some new challenges too so one of the outstanding challenges is qualifying am technology for critical applications in the oil and gas and nuclear power industries these industries as mike pointed out rely upon decades of material development to ensure integrity of their facilities and they are in some cases prohibited from adopting new material forums without changes in their underlying codes and standards there have been some new standards for am material qualification published in the past few years and we're working with our suppliers to qualify our parts to these standards the transition to am requires careful discussions with our customers about the application risk and the qualification options as this sort of a matrix of technology and qualification matures year by year so that's very exciting one of the programs we did recently with great support from below 3d and in partnership with one of our oil and gas customers was to make an accelerated program to see how we would apply uh am technology in an oil and gas facility and so we work with our customer to identify a candidate valve design which in this case was a choke valve we had an accelerated process development we divide we looked at both the valve design characteristics how to specify the parts for am what test coupons to build how to measure those test coupons so we had a very fast rapid um focus on those areas to generate a process specification the build and its characteristics were optimized for the um customer field conditions because with am we can sort of customize for each application and we've followed the um the documents or requirements of a standard called api 20s which is a recently published oil and gas specification which defines how to uh validate and control am parts and this provides a real road map for us for how to establish the scalable supply chain around the world how to deploy consistent parts in different sites with reliable metallurgy for our most critical customers and these parts are currently under field trials and we're really hoping to uh have some good results on this and now i'll turn over to zach to talk about the villa 3d technology thank you steve um so like you saw in steve's uh section of the presentation there's a lot of kind of synergies we saw between bellow 3d and what imi has been doing in the last several years um so our plan is to go through our technology as well as in detail of how we qualify the parts he showed in the previous section so fellow 3d was founded in 2014 as of close to the end of last year we are a publicly traded company on the new york stock exchange and what we've brought to market is a revolutionary new end-to-end metal am solution the goal of the solution is to deliver complex high-value metal parts um without the design or quality compromise that have been seen with legacy processes or legacy meddling them we do have service and support worldwide we are a worldwide company but the technology is designed and built uh here in the united states so some of the companies that we work with uh you can see listed on the screen but the real intent here is to show across different industries a lot of these supply chain and kind of design consideration challenges are uh the same across different industries they might just have to adhere to different specifications or be called uh kind of you know have different challenges but between aviation space energy and defense a lot of what we're going to talk about today including what we've done with imi translates fairly well so a lot of the parts that we find our technology mostly used for are static and rotational parts that are optimized to control flow of fluids and or the transferring feed and our main goal is to provide these types of parts to our customers without basically getting the exact part they want without needing to compromise things like quality and geometry which we'll go through in a few of the next sections so what is the develo end-to-end metal am solution the our end-to-end solution consists of three components um so flow is our proprietary pre-print software that allows cad to be um loaded into the software a build to be set up and create an instruction set that the printer so the next section the sapphire printers can then execute these instruction sets and the assured quality validation software is the third component that takes a lot of the data and information before during and after the build to provide information on the health of the actual printer itself as well as tremendous amount of data and information on the end part quality so at the heart of it um the manufacturing technology is laser powder bed fusion which essentially you can see through these graphics we are laying down a finite layer of metal powder and then lasing that instruction set for that layer lowering the piston again laying powder and then continuing this process until we have a fully complete part at the end of the of the print that's important to see one of the benefits one of the first benefits of what we've done with our end-to-end solution which is uh to understand that you have to understand supports in metal am which are actually anchors and the best analogy is shown through these images where on the bottom left you have a desired outcome like the flow channel that that steve uh went through on some of their valves what happens in conventional am if you don't anchor or support that uh area you have warping of the metal um and at in in traditional systems something is going to get either the part like you would see in this example or the recoder on the printer itself or both in some in some cases and so to adhere to that you either have to change your design um like like steve mentioned they had done in 2017 or you have to heavily support these internal channels which is uh very cumbersome in terms of post-processing and removing those supports afterwards since they're made of the same material that the part is what we've done here at velo3d and one of the first benefits of our end-to-end solution is is focusing on printing the part that you actually want whether it's a legacy or a new design and working towards not having to defam or change that part or add anchors so one of the uh this leads into our first kind of discussion on one of the parts of the intent solution which is the flow preprint software so flow it intelligently identifies different features because we are working with the native cad file each feature is automatically assigned a pre-developed recipe and these recipes are aimed at overcoming feature-specific failure mechanisms and there's a library of dozen recipes that we're continuously growing and have been growing over the last several years and the software's built with flexibility to define and identify some of these new features so going into even more detail uh kind of drilling down on the float pre-print software using the example of the cages or choke valves that we printed with imi here recently um you break it apart into two sections one is the flow build preparation so in this case you would you would import the cad file you would orient and support the part as needed um and then apply any amount of sub processes so you can see this visualization on the top section on the left is the flow build preparation software where we've imported the cad we've supported the parts and then on the right image we've applied a sub processee by selecting all the surfaces of the channels and and doing a sub process that is is intended for these small type of channels that allows for more consistent performance once printed you're also then able to populate the build plate so you can see the blue is the the first set of information that was put in there our first set of cad and we're able to translate that exact uh geometry to the right uh on the green section from there we move into our second phase which is the flow process review so we've now sliced the part into 2d sections which is essentially generating the laser instructions and then this print file that's generated this is what contains the lock in print instructions or laser instructions that can be printed on any of the fellow sapphire printers and also allows for review of the prepared print file which you can see on the bottom right section so to understand where the process is is stable there are sets of design rules so in this case working with steve and his team um we needed to understand what could uh where the stable region was for for different closures so how thick the the actual um top thickness of the channels are as well as at what angle they were positioned in and so on the bottom right you can also see one of these uh similar type cages kind of being built to show you know this kind of design geometry the next step is the sapphire family of printers so if you look at the bottom right the first uh identification is the size of what you can actually print which are the build volume of the printer so for sapphire uh contains a 315 millimeter diameter uh by 400 millimeter tall build platform the sapphire 1mz is the exact same construction it just has the ability to print uh taller up to a one full meter and then the sapphire xc is our newest development that's intended for larger parts or more of the same parts hence the xe for extra capacity and it's a 600 millimeter diameter platform um with 500 fill with 550 millimeters tall the uh lasers on the system so sapphire is equipped with two one kilowatt lasers and the sapphire xe is eight one kilowatt lasers and both systems have in situ laser alignment the inert environment is argon and the process uh layer thickness is a standard uh 50 microns it is equipped with one-click calibrations which we'll get into in the next section and is equipped with multiple metrology and sensor capabilities to be able to document essential variables and data during the print in terms of the production-ready material on the top section are the materials that are qualified for our system so what that means is we have mechanical properties uh vetted and understood that we can provide as well as all the parts that you've seen on the previous slides the process recipes have been created and qualified for those materials on the bottom you see the coming soon alloys um and then the estimation that we we typically give is about three months to do the qualification which is important to understand and why we call it production-ready material processes is we provide the mechanical uh understanding as well as make sure that those generalized recipes are transferred again to print all the parts that you've seen in the previous slides the last part is the assure quality software um so this is broken down into multiple sections one is factory monitoring so people that own our printers or own a fleet of printers can see a real-time kind of fleet tracking can see all the printers and drill into live build process uh progress monitoring on any of the prints going on for those printers the uh tool health ability to have one-click system calibrations that can be checked before every single build or at the cadence of whatever a specification or a provider and uh end user have have come to terms with and then the in process monitoring so things like optics health powder bed quality and the build chamber environment that's being monitored throughout the entirety of the build and then build reporting is one of the big keys that we'll uh talk about when we go through the api 20s qualification that we work with imi on where all this information is is put at the end of the build into a pdf which we call a build report that has all sorts of information on the build itself as well as the tool and build data documentation so the other advantage beyond the geometry uh that can be printed and the reduction in supports and having greater design freedom putting all these pieces together specifically the the pre the locked in uh instruction set that's created by flow and the ability for the systems to be uh the calibration to be checked before every single build it's really enabled what we termed the golden print file which really allows for a flexible supply chain and what this means is that a single print file can be created and can be printed on any fellow 3d printer of the same material at any location no matter who's operating it and expect to get the exact same end part so our global contract manufacturing network we have a handful of concrete manufacturers in the united states and around the world and are continuing to grow this manufacturing network to provide that type of global supply chain flexibility so focusing uh on the the the oil and gas cages that that steve brought up at the end of his section what we wanted to walk through is how we use the n10 solution to really qualify these type of products and again it's the same for most industries you're going to focus on material qualification the actual system or process qualification in this case is the sapphire and the actual part qualification so moving to the next slide the material qualification because steve and his team had such a history with laser powder bedfusion there wasn't necessarily a database of materials that needed to be understood they understood kind of laser powder bed fusion and what was capable and what to uh expect from a material process but the rest of the industry the rest of the world is is not always there to that extent or have that history and so there's a lot of things like mmpds for aerospace and defense or nace type qualification for oil and gas that are founded in kind of statistics of mechanical properties to provide people the comfort of using this type of process or these types of processes to design their parts and have be comfortable in the material and so because of again our integrated push button printer calibration and our one print file for all printers globally we're able to go work with these industry uh kind of specifications and be able to lower the barrier or increase the comfort of using these type of materials or in the case with steve and his team be able to push into even more aggressive applications such as type environments the next step was a sapphire qualification so this was the first production valve produced on velo3d technology um like steve mentioned we applied the the standardization of api 20s which specifies um how to set up the builds what testing to do and what documentation needs to be provided to meet the api 20s spec and then steve and his team based on their history provided the success criteria um so we did the first article built in accordance to api 20s and msl level 3 which is the highest criticality um the api 20s essential variables that that needed to be documented were automatically part of the build report so those same essential variables are the things that we consider as important to monitor during the build and supply in the build report and the flow tests demonstrate the consistency of the generalized process provided by flow where you can see them the chart on the bottom the the first ever valve printed on our technology meeting the flow characteristics needed for this application so now the sapphire was qualified the next uh part was the actual part qualification and so moving on to the production build that's uh called out by api 20s we were able to produce the parts and like steve mentioned these valves are in field operation for a major oil and gas operator so moving again into the uh the the second phase of being able to print across a large network um and increase the the supply chain flexibility uh we have two examples here one is using conventional am where you're taking a cad creating an stl a build file and then depending on the technology there's different um items that could pop up whether you're wanting to print again in the next week or printing a year or two from now that can sometimes complicate being able to have a global supply chain or a kind of digital inventory approach essentially the way i look at it is being able to create a bill of material and locking in the as printed model saying this is what i would print a year or 20 years from now on the bottom uh kind of simply drawn out is the what the end time solution is capable of where we can take the cad geometry um create a velo build file slice the file create a valid print file and because that's a locked instruction set and because of the way our printer's calibrations work we have this golden print file that can print on any sapphire anywhere in the world of the same material and so what we've been able to do kind of adding a further context to what steve has gone over is you see the three-inch choke valve that he discussed for an oil and gas production facility we've been able to our imi's been able to confidently move across our network network of contract manufacturers and print things like this 12-inch gas let down valve for an offshore facility as well as this 10 inch boiler feed pump valve for supercritical power plants and have the confidence that the the end part quality and the design is intact once complete and then in terms of the three inch choke valve you can see um now that that part has been qualified in-house now that part's been qualified either on someone's in-house printer or an external printer in this case working with imi uh after qualifying other vendors they're now have the confidence whether it's two weeks from now or two years from now to print that same print file uh at any of these suppliers in the future i'll pass it back over to steve for the conclusion thank you so in the beginning of our journey at imicci we were happy just to get one you know cool piece of metal printed was a cool thing to do but now that we're scaling up the business around the world it's very important to us we recognize the value of having an end-to-end solution which controls quality and consistency so we find the velo approach to be very attractive in that regard the flow print preparation software leverages past years of laser powder beta fusion experience we don't have to reinvent the wheel each time it uses the qualified build recipes with print file instructions that are locked we don't have to worry about if things are changing behind the scenes it maintains iep for the print instruction file which again is increasingly important as we deploy around the world does not require a process development engineer to reevaluate each build every single time reduces the variability often seen from manufacture to manufacturers so this was a big concern for us if someone buys a different machine or we go to different supplier how do we manage all that as a as a valve part supplier and then the assure system provides the input quality the monitors and process of reports on calibration and essential process variables and provides validation that the flow print file will be uh executed consistently from machine to machine globally and then the benefits to us is this gives a more scalable supply chain for imi cci and retrofit 3d and we are customers of global we have to give them global consistency in terms of quality and execution and material science so that's very valuable to us it paves the way for imis he said to qualify our am parts for energy industry quality standards because it removes question marks around consistency it gives us what we need to move forward and uh the villa 3d technology can print our legacy designs without dfam design for added manufacturing that's very attractive for us given our huge library of reference parts and we can print really large parts up to 24 inch diameter with the sapphire xc technology so we're very excited about the work that's going on here on the way forward thank you all right that was really awesome um and i've got a great question to get us kicked off here um lynne brings in the perfect question so if you've been to a trade show you've seen i mean we're lousy with great looking parts um and len i think you hit the nail on the head here the benefits of am to resolve supply chain issues are pretty clear why isn't the scale of am used in supply chains 10 times 100 times what it is and i think that's a great place to start and we'll keep it up from there well i'll speak from our experience so i remember when i first read about the am i thought i don't i don't want to go there it sounds like a mystery so people that haven't looked at it don't understand the power of it i think and what's available with it so it there is always a certain um inertia in the organization i think to make these kinds of changes because when you make a change in metallurgy a lot of questions come up and it does require a very confident look at both the application risk and how you're going to manage it and it's uh but again our experience has been very good we think it's very much worth the journey and encourage people to you know talk to suppliers talk to their end customers and have those discussions i think from kind of from our side you know the benefit of what we've developed from the n10 solution has really been to like steve said you're changing a manufacturing process and there's sometimes a list of things that you have to consider and if you're having to change the design if you're not able to get the have confidence in the same end part across different vendors you know just changing the manufacturing process and adding those other variables can be sometimes hard to swallow across an uh kind of a manufacturing quality uh what have you in the engineering organization um we feel like we've you know lowered a lot of those barriers and made it to where you are looking at like steve said we're focusing on the mechanicals is the the microstructure okay and then being able to confidently kind of scale uh metal a.m so i mean kind of connected to that original question do you expect over the near term you're going to see a spike in uh am applications given this technology exists now to fill in some of these caps i think we're just on the start of the transition you know we've changed our disk decks over to this because they're obvious they were a high number of process steps required i think that there's another jump to be made and people start thinking about the bigger picture of how parts are used how they can integrate assemblies take out process depths which makes it safer faster and easier to make parts for customers so i think we're just on the beginning of the journey yeah fantastic uh there's another question um in here from amy amy asks is ndt done on the am parts in situ monitoring or do you use only the flow and hydraulic press deflection test to qualify the birds zach you want to go first on uh maybe cover the uh your end yeah so typically i mean it's kind of defined by the the designer of the part or the the specification being used so in the case of api 20s each of those builds uh you know they contained a set of mechanical samples that needed to be tested and it also included some amount of ndt that that was required to be performed and even more so because we did it towards amso level 3 which is the highest category and then on our end we have to look at each application a bit uniquely so certainly for critical applications in oil and gas there's a higher level of integrity required testing so we look at each application each industry say whatever our customers expect and how do we want to address those uncertainties and then we generate a test specification accordingly but it varies from simple to more complex you just have to understand the application excellent there's a question for you steve another one from lynn how do you find applying the requirements of api 20s how are you providing assurance of its application and do clients understand what it is and it isn't there's a couple questions there so um i think the 20s was published past uh i think this winter i think i think it's still being promulgated i think not i think very few users in oil and gas or oil and gas customers are aware of it yet i think it will grow in importance i think you have to engage very closely with your suppliers because as you can see from the um the presentation by that there are things you want to monitor and watch and you want to have a good partner for that process if you're ordering parts of 220s in am awesome uh zach any color on that or steve cup covered i think no i i tend to agree with steve i think it's a conglomeration of what was required a lot of these these standards and specifications of all the you know technology that's available and i think one of our benefits that we saw um to steve's point is is working with us you know most of the stuff that need to be documented or understood it's stuff that we're already monitoring and outputting in our build report which should over time you know things like that simplify the you know having to or how to apply to api 20s okay a couple questions on the global supply chain that you mentioned earlier how do the current global material availability or supply chain issues affect bello 3ds manufacturing time frame and has powder availability and or quality been affected by this that's the first one we haven't seen any um uh quality or availability issues with with the the already kind of approved and qualified materials some of the newer materials we're looking at that aren't as well known in in kind of metal am um meaning only a handful of solution providers that have looked into those alloys spinning those those that supply chain up and having that be a stable supply chain i think is the biggest thing we've seen is mainly the newer more exotic materials that people are starting to explore there's one from stefan here to use a worldwide the same print file sounds good but then all machines must be in the same condition or calibration uh but there are always some tolerances how do you compensate for this yeah so there's a uh there's quite a bit of detail on that question and things we probably need to cover in a completely different session but the way we handle our calibrations um and then the way that the print file is not able to be changed um ensures that you're getting the same end part it's things that we're doing in different industries right now through our cm network and actually have some studies going on with steve to to in his company to prove that out even further um i think to go into the excruciating details of of you know how those calibrations are done i think we have a previous fellow virtual as well as can probably have a different session to be honest mike where we go through that in quite a bit more detail yeah it's a great question if you want to know more about calibrations we have a ton of content on it it is definitely a differentiator for us uh and we definitely do take pride in that um okay so another one from len uh to scale the use of am how are you analyzing uh skus to find the ones where there is a good case to go with am and you kind of mentioned a little bit before steve uh some of your thought process around selection yeah so i had a lot of discussion in the past with some of our leadership here and they would bring me parts which were made from bar right so a part you can make from bar and put on a trending operation probably not a good uh case for am but if you're taking that part and you're adding a lot more features to it a lot more multi-axis features and you should be thinking about am so for me the disc dax was an obvious case because i had such a complex rich geometry in the part and so that was an obvious one to pursue for am but to me that's in at least in my world we kind of work in either parts made from bar and castings or the disk stacks so that was again i was very fortunate i had an easy target to go after i think kind of to add to that you know that's why we've even created this this newer team might hand out that that you know i'm now leading in terms of the technical business development is it's really an extension of what me and steve have worked on for the last two years which is understanding surface finish understanding um uh tolerancing understanding the actual design intent having a very technical engineering type discussion on these type of parts any type of parts at a company but more importantly finding what those challenges are and so like steve said if it's something that you can just turn down very simply it might not lend itself and as you get more and more complicated add more and more processes and have to be honest more and more pain in the supply chain those are usually good candidates that start popping out i just add one more point to it too so as zach was talking i was thinking so if you have a part that's already a high alloy part it's worth looking at if there's a part that's not a high alloy point but making it a high alloy part provides the opportunity to provide more benefits to your end customer better performance lighter weight better reliability then those should be looked at too because one for me of the powers of am is it unlocks the ability to use high alloy parts in whole new configurations and fully leverage their capabilities that i couldn't do before because i was buying dumb pieces of bar and dumb plates so that's a very attractive potential for me and even bringing that back to the supply chain you know like the question from earlier if some of those those higher alloys are required buying that plate and bar now is a bigger supply chain issue that i see than getting the powder since you're using such little amount of the raw material in metal a.m

that's a great point uh brandon asks this is a great application for aem can you comment on any surface finishing processes that were used for internal channels of the disk stacks that's a very good question so um whenever you're looking at an am part transition you really have to maybe before you do or as you do it is stop and look inside the parts you make today and what is their real characteristics and what are their real process uncertainties so um the parts we make today are not perfectly smooth on the inside so i took advantage of that because am is different from polished metal it's different from an asrold condition it's not bad it's just different and i was able to benchmark that against what we did already and make the judgment that it was probably going to be okay in addition we validated that with float testing so you do want to like i said when you start the journey you really start to look at your current parts and say what do i really know about them or not know about them because there may be some opportunities for am you haven't thought about before yeah i think that's a you know that's a great analogy because usually you're starting with a a part or a design and sometimes a surface finish requirement through history has been dictated by the manufacturing process instead of the need from the actual application i think am it opens up that sometimes uncomfortable but to be honest kind of fun from an engineering standpoint understanding of digging in that i know you know my time at halliburton i was notorious for the one that always questioned my 125 surface finish was called out on everything and sometimes it's a standard that calls that out sometimes the manufacturing process versus actually what you need to actually for the performance of the application uh and then there's another question uh doesn't amsl3 require a test for each part uh so msl level three requires uh uh you either have to test a like a sacrificial part or you can have prolongations and in this case we used prolongation so i think we might have uh when we showed the pictures to the right of the finished parts what we didn't show is the the same build was run for uh the first article as well as the production which included uh hardness impact samples uh tensile samples um density samples that were all tested each uh each phase of that okay excellent so that that is what i have for questions uh steve i'd like to get some closing thoughts from you i'll turn it over to you well okay so uh thanks everybody for the questions i hope you enjoyed the presentation and if you have any questions about how we've replied am i be glad to be available to help answer those and uh want to thank the team at villo for their support on this session and uh on this project thank you great zack yeah so to reiterate what us you said thanks everybody kind of for having us and and if there are questions uh kind of the support that steve's talking about that is what our our teams do one of the big elements of how we support our customers um uh even people that that you know don't plan to purchase a system is looking at the the applications helping transition some of their parts and make a lot of sense in our system you know into production so thank you all very much and have a great rest of your week thank you bye-bye thanks

2022-04-04 12:22

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