During this year’s TCT Conference @ Formnext Connect, Jordan Van Flute, Chief Technology Officer at Inovus Medical (Inovus) will share how additive manufacturing has allowed the UK-based medical simulation equipment developer to deliver affordable and highly functional medical training devices. Here, the CTO speaks to TCT about the company’s journey with 3D printing from a prototyping tool to a means for mass production.
Inovus began the way any good start-up story does; in a garage, cobbling together your first prototypes using any tools you can get your hands on and “bumbling away through engineering problems” as Jordan Van Flute, Chief Technology Officer at Inovus recently recalled to TCT.
Having forgone any formal engineering training, it’s a career that found him, not the other way around, as the self-proclaimed “natural engineer” had a knack for taking things apart and tinkering. Yet it was that non-traditional background that freed the CTO from the constraints of those conventional engineering ways of doing things and, as Van Flute puts it, one of the reasons they ended up at 3D printing.
Founded in 2012 by a trio of psychology and medical graduates in the North West of England, Inovus is a designer and manufacturer of medical simulation products designed for teaching skills in critical care, medicine hysteroscopic and general surgery. Pursuing careers in the medical industry allowed the founders to see first-hand the challenges students and medical professionals faced in getting access to high quality, affordable and versatile healthcare training equipment. After putting the feelers out, they learned the problem was a common one in the industry and set out to come up with a solution and build their own.
Of those first basic prototypes, Van Flute said the team gained positive traction early on with some key opinion leaders but after running the numbers on the more traditional manufacturing route of finding a designer, outsourcing in large volumes and storing surplus stock, they realised they would need to take a different approach if they were to realise their ambitions.
He said: “There was just no way that we could create something that was affordable enough to be able to sell it to the end user at the kind of price point that we needed it to be in order to be able to provide accessible surgical simulation across the board for anyone training at home, all the way through to training in the hospital.”
But a first sale early on to the NHS through Wigan Royal Infirmary allowed the team to invest in their first piece of advanced machinery; a CNC machine, acrylic bending machine, and a desktop 3D printer.
“It was a little tiny desktop machine, originally just bought to create tiny little component parts,” Van Flute explained. “One of the things that you must remember about our sector is that it's a very low volume but high margin sector [...] so, it allows us to be able to use these technologies that otherwise wouldn't be available to other manufacturers within this space. That was our first taste of 3D printing and we discovered that we could do all kinds of different things in different geometries that we couldn't do in the traditional machines. That's really what got the seed planted.”
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The team spent time honing their craft and building out their production capacity until 2013 when they outgrew their humble garage and moved to a new facility … a basement underneath a pub. But this phase allowed them to grind and reinvest in yet more sophisticated machinery until eventually moving to their current premises where the company has lived for the last three years.
Though it wasn’t until 2014, in a project brought to them by Edge Hill University in Liverpool, when Van Flute says Inovus really began to explore the full potential of 3D printing. Tasked with creating a piece of training equipment for cricoid pressure, they started looking at the possibility of 3D printing casings as an alternative to injection moulding in order to save money on tooling costs and manufacture in low volumes. Working with a service provider, Van Flute and team had a selection of selective laser sintered parts in-hand within a week.
“I think that was a real moment for me where I thought this technology could change our sector in a big way because we knew that it was all about low volumes but maximising the margin. And we knew that by having a technology like that at your fingertips, you could make changes on the fly that you couldn't with injection moulding. It gave us so much flexibility.”
Inovus continued working with the service bureau for a couple of years before deciding to bring SLS in-house. The team went shopping at TCT Show 2018 and after raising a few eyebrows at a number SLS vendors, a representative from 3D Systems was at the Innovus office within a matter of days with a handful of SLS parts in tow. The first 3D Systems ProX SLS 6100 machine was installed in January last year and since then, Van Flute explained, the company has “exploded.”
“We are already now at full capacity with that machine,” Van Flute said. “So, whereas we had this one product that we were SLS printing when we first got started, we now SLS print about six casings for different products and make a total of about 560 smaller component parts that are used inside of much larger assemblies.”
Not only has SLS enabled Inovus to print parts directly, including the ability to print quick changes on the fly or produce replacements for customers, it has also improved other areas of production like the printing of injection mould tools for silica parts. It’s just one of the ways the company is doing things differently, but key to this success, particular in mass manufacture, Van Flute believes is actually in the way Inovus finishes its parts.
“We try and do things as modestly as possible and in a way that's most cost effective. We're problem solvers and engineers and we really enjoy that process. When it comes to things like the finishing processes, rather than having that huge CapEx up front or the incredibly expensive consumable costs of things like dye, we we've taken that all internally and we've created our own machines to process parts at a speed and quality that suits us as a business.”
From FDM prototypes to end-use parts being churned out daily across a multitude of applications, 3D printing has become an integral part of the Inovus story and it’s one Van Flute says the team enjoys sharing with customers who may be unfamiliar with the kinds of end-use capabilities now possible with the technology, specifically powder-baed AM.
“Like a lot of industries, there's a lot of excitement in anything that is made in a different way,” Van Flute said. “I think that for people who are familiar with [SLS], it's not as mind blowing, which is a shame, but for people who aren't, like a lot of the people that we work with in our industry, it's mind blowing for them to see some of these casings.”
Reflecting on that journey with the technology, Van Flute added: “I don't think I envisaged with those desktop machines where we would end up but it certainly was the thing that kind of led us to where we are and I, as I always do, just let it take its course. I think that that's sums me up really as an engineer, I just kind of let things happen and let them evolve naturally.”
