“Now that we’re happy, it’s about time we tell the real story.”
As the second day of RAPID + TCT comes to a close, the drinks trolleys are being rolled out, food is being served, and Chief Business Officer Dror Danai begins to give an honest account of the development of XJet’s metal 3D printing technology.
Metal was on the agenda of the XJet team – much of whom had worked together years earlier at Objet – from as early as 2016. By Formnext 2017, the company was exhibiting its Carmel 1400 systems at trade shows and talking up the potential of Nanoparticle Jetting with metal materials, and then gradually it started to go quiet, with the company’s ceramic offering being pushed to the fore instead.
This was not the plan. The venture of ceramics was one of opportunity, with XJet acknowledging the materials were easier to buy and easier to cut into nanoparticles, but it was also one of necessity.
“We literally failed to do the metal,” Danai tells TCT, “but we wanted to go to market. To create a company, to create an installed base, logistics team, and operations, you need to have customers. It was easier to fulfil it with ceramics, which was never on the strategic plan originally. [In 2016], we said, you know what, let’s try to do [ceramics] and within one year we had a product and we had an open house in Youngstown, Ohio. It’s only management that was aware of that. You don’t want to talk about your plan B.”
XJet
Azoth co-founder Cody Cochran greets Dror Danai at an open house to mark the installation of the Carmel 1400M metal 3D printer.
In lieu of a market-ready metals technology to discuss, talking about plan B has been exactly what XJet has done in the interim years. While one team within XJet persevered with the processing of metal materials on XJet’s Carmel 1400M platform, another team raced to market. With ceramics, that team was free of oxidation risks, it enjoyed the brittleness of the materials that allowed them to be cut into nanoparticles, ceramics also hold less weight and so were an easier match for XJet’s soluble support material.
It gave XJet a way into the market, with the likes of KU Leuven, Syqe Medical, AB Universal, University of Delaware, Marvel Medtech, Straumann, the MTC and more recently Spyros Panopoulos Automotive (SPA) adopting the technology. From this adoption, XJet has seen its technology applied for medical applications, dental parts and, in the case of SPA, a TCT Award-nominated engine piston. This, Danai believes, is ‘design for additive manufacturing at its best’ with a stress analysis facilitating the laying down of material only in areas where the part will be exposed to stress.
But it hasn’t always been plain sailing on the ceramic side either. With a new, novel technology out in the field, teething problems were also likely. In the COVID-19 pandemic, however, XJet had an opportunity to address those issues while its customers’ use of the machines slowed down. Identifying the ten biggest pain points, the ceramics team at XJet tackled each one at a time across a 15-month period.
Get your FREE print subscription to TCT Magazine.
Exhibit at the UK's definitive and most influential 3D printing and additive manufacturing event, TCT 3Sixty.
“We’ve perfected everything and now our ceramic system holders are buying their second – actually, one is buying their third machine. So that’s now robust,” Danai says. “There are no answers at the end of the book. [With] powder bed fusion, EOS did it 20 years ago, so SLM [Solutions] can copy some of the answers – some of the patents are there. We didn’t have anybody to do that. We created 79 patents over the years because everything we created; we were the only ones. Nobody does direct jetting, not in metals, not in ceramics.”
Now, XJet can say it does both because the downtime during the pandemic also facilitated significant progress to be made with metals.
XJet
Metal parts printed on the XJet Carmel 1400M.
“Metal, we couldn’t make a part. And I’m talking about the part that will be the best in the world, the part that will have all the details, that will not take time to process, that will be [compatible] with soluble support, all these attributes that we promised six years ago,” Danai says. “We just worked very hard. We tried a different approach. I can’t tell all the details – some because I have no clue and some, I do have a clue but it’s very confidential.
“That also took 15 months and in August [2021], Hanan [Gothait, then the CEO] comes to me and says, ‘we’re almost there. It’s feasible.’ I said, ‘I don’t sell it unless it’s really going to work this time. I can’t, people know me in the industry.’ He said, ‘look, it’s the chicken and the egg. If you don’t bring a customer that you agree to sell to, we will never be able to perfect it.’”
At the end of this conversation commenced a search for a Midwest-based customer that would be interested in XJet’s metal 3D printing offering, would be willing to take the first installation and would host an open house to showcase the machine ahead of RAPID + TCT 2022. In the autumn, Danai met Mattia Forgiarini, an engineer at Michigan-based Azoth, struck up an immediate rapport, and 24 hours later was in discussions with the company’s management about the first sale of a Carmel 1400M system.
XJet
Metal parts printed on the XJet Carmel 1400M.
First, though, XJet had to pass a test. Azoth sent across ten STL files of parts that they haven’t been able to print on any other metal additive technology. When XJet sent over eight successful prints, Azoth was ready to sign the contract that would secure the purchase. Then, the Azoth team visited XJet in Tel Aviv, with Forgiarini spending Monday through Thursday operating the Carmel 1400M machine and inspecting the parts that were printed. The feedback was good.
On the Friday, Danai took Forgiarini on an excursion to the Dead Sea and as they floated on the water, the latter turned to the former and offered an explanation as to why metal Nanoparticle Jetting is capable of outputting parts in such quality and detail.
“Stainless steel has a melting point of about 1400°C to 1450°C. Most systems work in this area,” Danai says, scribbling 1380°C on the Y-axis of a graph he is illustrating, before marking particle sizes across the X-axis. “Some of them have 40 microns, 50 microns, 60 microns or even 100. If you take that particle, [1380°C] is what it needs to be sintered, but the story is a little more interesting when you go down [in micron size]. You need less energy and less temperature to sinter. When you go to one micron, instead of 1380, you’re in 1200, which means you make very, very small features.”
At this point, Danai reaches for some metal parts being displayed on the booth, including one with a tiny hole.
“I don’t know if you can even see the small hole here, a 20-micron hole. Most technologies will not go there. Because what happens is that when you go very close to the melting point, it is likely to close or deform. If you have very small features, they’re likely to change their geometry. We are 200 degrees away from melting point [with stainless steel], this allows us to go much, much lower in features, so we can duplicate small holes [and integrate] small features that nobody else can do.”
With parts laid on the table and the capabilities of XJet’s metal 3D printing technology spelt out, the conversation turned to applications. Healthcare components are considered the 'prime application' – due to their use of and the Carmel 1400M’s compatibility with 316L stainless steel – but Azoth also serves a host of automotive and industrial companies which might have some scope to utilise the technology further down the line. Whatever the industry, XJet is targeting small to medium production volumes.
“I think people are fantasising when it comes to millions,” Danai says. “AM is not the answer. When it’s 100,000, maybe. 50,000, for sure. If you need to make 50,000 [small parts], I can make them in a few months, very easy. I can make 1,000 every tray, 2,000 per day, and 50,000 per month. With a small part, maybe I can get even half a million a year, but for bigger parts, probably only 50,000 or 60,000. That’s the sweet spot. Small parts production because we are in very small particles, very small layers and very far from [melting temperature], we can have a much higher level of predictability and repeatability.”
Azoth started running the Carmel 1400M machine on May 2nd and by May 17th, XJet had a booth full of metal 3D printed parts at RAPID + TCT. The company delivered the machine in under six months from when the contract was signed and is informing prospective buyers of a six-month turnaround time for new orders while the machine is available in limited volumes. A ramp-up will come later this year, with XJet setting things in place at the leadership level in preparation.
Yair Alcobi, with a background in semiconductors, was appointed CEO last month, with co-founder Hanan Gothait assuming the role of President. Orit Tesler Levy, another with experience in semiconductors, has joined as CFO, while Andy Middleton – formerly of Stratasys – was appointed as Business Director for Central Europe in January. Avi Cohen was named as Executive Chairman last year – and was present at RAPID + TCT – and the company has also recruited Harry Danford – who has sales experience at ExOne, AddUp and Uniformity Labs, started as VP of Sales in North America in May.
“We are moving, we’re ready,” Danai says. “If we were not ready, we wouldn’t appoint somebody from semiconductors to CEO, we wouldn’t take a manager that was running Stratasys in Europe. Now, the metal will still go slow, production for this series is still manual. Mass production starts towards Formnext – by Formnext we’ll start to increase, but also the demand will increase. We want to keep it in Germany, the US, later on this year maybe the UK, maybe Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou, so we limit it to very specific places, certain applications – especially healthcare, and automotive. We know already where the next machines are going this year. For next year, we are already buying the components – we had huge supply chain challenges, so to overcome them we ordered now based on the success of the open house [at Azoth].
“It’s like moving from kindergarten to elementary school. We’re still not in high school, we’re more conservative and want to make sure the technology works. We crawl and then we try to walk, then we fail, and then we walk again, and eventually, we are running. We are in the phase where we are no longer crawling, we are walking very steady, and we are about to start running.”
