Essentium
Essentium
As dusk fell over a chilly Frankfurt, Formnext exhibitors trudged back to hotels with bags hoisted over weary shoulders as a long week concluded.
Through the revolving doors of the Hotel Frankfurt Messe managed by Meliá came the Essentium cohort, led by co-founders Blake Teipel and Brandon Sweeney, with the former making a left turn towards the bar upon noticing a few familiar faces.
“This year’s Formnext in one word. Go.”
“Materials,” was the response given after a brief pause for thought.
“I’ll take that, I’m a materials scientist.”
Some 80 hours earlier, Essentium had announced its own contribution to that theme, joining the likes of Clariant, Henkel, MakerBot, Adaptive3D, newcomers 6K and the company’s partner BASF. Three new materials and a re-release of the company’s PEEK offering set up a busy Formnext, and rounded off an eventful year, for Essentium. The progression of the company through 2019 has perhaps been overshadowed by its court battle with Jabil, but despite that potential spanner in the works, everything seems to be ticking along nicely.
CEO Teipel is unperturbed as those legal proceedings continue, describing the 3D printing industry as one that ‘enjoys more than its fair share of lawsuits per capita’ thanks to its, at-times, ‘Wild West-like' atmosphere. “Running the company is not an issue,” he told TCT. “We’re shipping machines, we’re shipping materials and our customers are printing parts.”
That trifecta of occurrences was demonstrated all around Teipel as he sat deep in the centre of the stand, a High Speed Extrusion (HSE) machine just beyond his shoulder, a wall plastered with HSE-certified filament spools across the way, and shelves of tooling applications around the corner.
Amidst all that, he began to verbalise the significance of his company’s latest material introductions. Three of the new four use the same high temperature nylon (HTN) base resin, with the standard formulation made up of an alloyed blend of a nylon 6 (PA 6) and a polyphthalamide (PPA). This gives the HTN material the processing benefits of PA 6 and the high-temperature performance, improved crystallinity and better solvent resistance of PPA. It is hard, dense and has low friction properties, meaning parts can slide in and out of printed fixtures, for example, without any marring.
"We respond to market pull as much as we can. The last thing a bunch of nerds want is a tech push."
Manufacturing aids – tooling, jigs, fixtures – is a big market for Essentium. The company believes the HTN material goes ‘head to head’ against Delrin, the trade name for polyoxymethylene (POM), which Teipel describes as ‘one of the most ubiquitous fixture materials on the planet’. He cites the stiffness, mechanical properties and thermal resistance of his HTN material as characteristics which match up to Delrin, while highlighting some of the advantages additive manufacturing has over machining.
“When you look at the costs that factories incur for the storage of sheets of Delrin, and then the machining costs for running it on a CNC and the waste that is created, compared to all of that, the 3D printing of a jig or a fixture from a performance material [gives] huge time and cost savings - not just for one or two parts, but actually for tens or hundreds of fixtures.”
New material number two is the HTN-CF 25 which, as you might be able to decipher, is a 25% chopped carbon fibre reinforced version of new material number one. “I cannot say enough good things about this material,” Teipel said, explaining how its 2-5mm fibre length helps to provide stiffness, while its multi-layered structure ensures mechanical property performance in the Z direction. This material is being pitched as a replacement for the 2021 series of aluminium, with motorsport and aerospace customers said to be taking a keen interest.
The third new material to feature the HTN base resin is the HTN-Z – the Z in Essentium products highlights the Z directional strength improvements made – which is an electrostatically dissipative grade, containing ‘electrically conductive bits’ inside of a polymer shell enabled by its multi-layered architecture. This product has been developed in accordance with customer feedback. With ESD safety, HTN-Z can be harnessed by electronics manufacturers to produce fixture components for printed circuit board assembly (PCBA). While the process of inserting electronic components into printed circuit boards is typically carried out by humans – “who are pretty good at being able to grab a screw, locate it and put it in,” per Sweeney – a move to robots is seemingly inevitable for such menial tasks. That will mean more fixtures will be required and Essentium’s focus on ESD-safe materials is thus.
“The needs for this industry are to have electrostatic discharge safe materials, so that’s why a lot of our product lines focus on inherent electrically conductive properties built in the material,” explained Head of Materials R&D Sweeney. “There’s also the need for high temperature processes, so when you’re assembling a circuit board and doing a reflow process on it, you want to make sure that if it’s going through a reflow oven and you have a tray carrying a bunch of boards that you can contain all the pieces and survive the temperatures without melting and destroying the part.”
There were several sample parts produced with the HTN series of filaments on Essentium’s Formnext stand, including a fixture component holding in place the shell of an Amazon Echo Dot which is ‘inspired by stuff that we see every day, but we couldn’t disclose whether manufacturers are doing this.’
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Essentium Echo Dot fixture
Sample part: Smart home speaker assembly fixture printed in Essentium's HTN-CF25 on a HSE S platform.
One thing manufacturers definitely are doing is using PEEK. At Formnext, Essentium announced the re-release of its PEEK grade, which is no longer an adaptation of a medical grade resin but has now been formulated in a viscosity and molecular weight suited for 3D printing with ‘all the high temperature performance, mechanical strength, solvent resistance of PEEK.’ It is, so far, the highest performing polymer in Essentium’s portfolio. And though Teipel and Sweeney are keen to point out companies that ‘need PEEK’ don’t always need PEEK and could actually save money with another high-temperature polymer, there’s plenty in industries like aerospace and healthcare who can’t do without it.
Demand continues to dictate the roadmap and while working with the US Air Force - Essentium was awarded a contract to support ground tooling and maintenance for the Air Force’s ageing aircraft with an early access partner - the company was asked about ULTEM 9085, a certified material in the space. In response, Essentium brought the development and certification of the material from Q2 2020 into this year. “We try to respond to the market pull as much as we can,” Teipel said. “The last thing a bunch of nerds want to do is a tech push.”
A similar attitude has been adopted in the certification of materials on the HSE platform outside of Essentium’s materials development lab. The company has this year been approached by one of its customers with a polypropylene-based material that Essentium had not yet identified. The customer had successfully put the material through an internal testing process for its moulding application and came to Essentium to ask if they would be allowed to run it on HSE. “They’re now creating some of the most beautiful parts from a moulding application that I’ve seen,” Teipel said. “And it’s a difficult material to work with, polypropylene based resins are very challenging but our HSE is more than up to the task.”
"The days of a single OEM environment are behind us. It's a vestige of the past."
The HSE can also process metal filaments – certification is in the 'near-term pipeline' – with customers already able to access BASF’s Ultrafuse 316L stainless steel and a 17-4 grade too. Essentium is still working through application identification and development with its users, but Teipel shares an excitement with customers, and waxed lyrical about BASF’s chemistry, citing the clean microstructure catalytic debinding creates as a significant achievement. “BASF’s done a great job. I’ll be interested to see where the market goes with that.”
Such is the rate at which production of the HSE platform is ramping at Essentium, Teipel mightn’t be waiting too long. By the end of 2019, the company will have deployed nearly 50 machines since shipping commenced in July, with a return of investment typically being generated within two to three months. A target of building five machines per week has been set for before April 2020, a step up from the three a week being manufactured and assembled right now.
The increased shipping of printers is being supplemented not only by an extensive materials portfolio, but developments on the software side too. Essentium has a partnership with Materialise, who joined BASF in investing in the company this time last year, which is focusing on the delivery of ‘an industrial class slicing software’ and making steps towards enabling a digital thread. Of the former, Essentium is currently going through beta testing with a commercial release scheduled soon. It is the result of nine months’ work with Materialise and will bring with it the capability for users to identify zones within the same x/y slice where they would like different extrusion parameters to, say, print faster in areas where cosmetics are not so important. The extrusion parameters of support structures can also be controlled, while users will also have access to ‘smarter’ infill patterns and have the ability to control and minimise hops and jumps. This platform fits into Materialise Magics but can also be purchased as a standalone product and can connect to the cloud or be installed locally. Build queuing will be the start of Essentium’s ‘journey towards the digital thread’, while customers have also asked about digital security and tool chain monitoring.
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Essentium: Filament conductivity test fixture.
Sample part: Filament conductivity test fixture.
Essentium is taking these questions on board and is to continue working with partners who share a similar outlook to theirs to provide the solution.
“One of the things I love about our partnerships with both Materialise and BASF is that everybody believes in open models, everybody believes that the customer comes first. The days of a single OEM environment are behind us, even though there are some vendors, new vendors [too], who still subscribe to this concept of a single OEM deployment for material, software, machine. You don’t see that anywhere in actual manufacturing. It’s a vestige of the past, the thoughts of yesterday, that additive manufacturing is going to have a bright future when nowhere in the machine tool space or semiconductor or anywhere else you have one machine to rule them all. You just have one machine that has to play nicely with its neighbours. I’m riffing a bit here, but my point is there will be other software packages. I couldn’t be more delighted with how the Materialise collaboration has gone [so far].”
While the already-available materials and the on-the-way software demonstrate the fruits of the company’s alliances, integral to those partnerships is a common vision. Between the three outfits there is a wealth of experience in the manufacturing space, the 3D printing industry, in the development of materials, and specific vertical markets too. It results in an awareness of how to drive additive manufacturing from where it is to where it wants to go.
But for this company, through this collaboration, there’s already a clear indicator as to the progress being made in the application of 3D printing.
In one word? Materials.
“It’s all industrial focus for us and our customers,” said Teipel “The interest that we see for the HTN portfolio has been really strong and, right alongside that, some of our top sellers are our TPU 74D, PCTG-Z, TPU 95A, the PA-CF has been a really strong seller.
“We haven’t sold PLA, I think, this year. I’ll just let that statement be self-explanatory.”
