AM UK National Strategy panel at TCT Show 2019.
During TCT Show 2017, Additive Manufacturing UK launched the AM UK National Strategy, which was a fully costed analysis of how the country can stay on top of the additive manufacturing game. As an early adopter, the UK is placed highly on install lists, with most pointing to the UK being in the top five and its academic institutes like Nottingham and She eld are renowned for their expertise. The launch of AM UK’s document was closely followed by the Government’s Industrial Strategy, which, on the surface, seemed to largely ignore the findings of AM UK; much to the chagrin of many in the industry.
At this year’s show Head of Content Daniel O’Connor sat down with some of the key players involved in the original AM UK steering groups to see where, two years down the line, we’re at. This conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Moderator: Daniel O’Connor (DOC)
Panelists:
Frank Cooper (FC), Associate Head for Industry and Enterprise at Birmingham City University School of Jewellery
Nicole Ballentine (NB), Knowledge Transfer Manager – Manufacturing at KTN
Jonathan Rowley (JR), Architect and former Design Director at 3D Printing Service Bureau
James Logan (JL), UK Collaborative R&D Funding Manager at MTC
Paul Unwin (PU), Co-Chair (Industrial) Strategy Steering Group of Additive Manufacturing UK
DOC: What would you say we are actually good at here in the UK?
FC: Well, we’re really good at making jewellery! We’re also good at being innovative and cost- effective about our designs.
NB: I see lots of small, agile manufacturers and I absolutely agree. We also have some fantastic research here but what we’re perhaps not so good at is the commercialisation of that research.
PU: The government has put in a pot of £200 million into additive manufacturing since 2012/13 and we’ve become very good right across the technologies. We’re very good at manufacturing machines, the post-processing, the non-destructive testing, really understanding the complete process. But I agree with Nicola, one of the biggest problems we have is commercialisation.
DOC: How are we going about the challenge of imparting all this AM knowledge into SMEs in the UK?
NB: Additive manufacturing technology is so broad-ranging and the message is potentially quite fragmented from OEMs. An OEM will go in to sell their technology, as opposed to what AM can do for manufacturers themselves. What we’re trying to do at the KTN is to dispel some of the myths and show how the technology can be used, right from the very small machines to the very large metal additive machines. We’re showing how it can be used for a number of different applications. It’s not just about jewellery design, and it’s not just about implants, but that it can be used in so many different ways.
DOC: On that point, and I’ll throw this open, did we lose our way with the messaging of the technology in shouting about series production and neglecting the more mundane applications?
PU: One of the biggest challenges we’ve got to get through in the next few years is helping manufacturers with the application process and picking out the right technologies. We all know that we’ve got to go to the train station to catch the train, but we don’t know which platform to get on, we don’t know which train it is, we don’t know what stations it’s going to stop at, and we don’t know how much it’s going to cost. And it’s exactly the same in AM, there are tens of thousands of manufacturers in Britain, and too few understand AM. They all recognise 3D printing, but they don’t really understand what it can actually do for their business.
JR: When I travel up from London to places like Birmingham on the train, you trundle slowly through an industrial estate where there are little enterprises inside of which people are making things. The frustration I feel is knowing that they are not engaged in this technology on any level whatsoever. There are any number of small applications they could use AM for on a very modest level. Not investing in an expensive machine, but doing a little bit of research and sourcing that from intelligent bureaus. One of the real problems with that adoption, from my perspective, is the use of language within this industry. When people do start looking into AM, what they hear is that it’s for high value manufacturing and if you’re not listening very carefully, you think oh, that’s for making expensive things. They also hear that they need to be adopting it, and if you’re not listening that carefully, adoption to them, that means buying it. Adopting AM is not about buying machines, it’s about using it.
Of course, it’s got a place for people like Rolls Royce and JLR, but UK industry is not just that top tier. There are purposeful applications for all within this and if the UK economy and UK industry is going to pick up on that, it’s got to be from the bottom up. Someone needs to light a re underneath that the bottom tier.
JL: There are fantastic companies out there with great machine needs and those are the ones who need to be looking at where the opportunities are coming from within the UK and for UK PLC. The likes of the aerospace sector is still very strong in the UK, and will continue to be so, as will motorsports and automotive. If you can gather together an impetus from a group of people who are willing to work together to create standards and the qualification processes, then it brings along that massive tier of companies that come underneath.
DOC: Frank, you work with companies big and small, are you seeing the trickle down of adoption?
FC: The jewellery industry is a bit of an anomaly in the 3D printing world; we’ve been 3D printing for 20 years. It’s an accepted process so we don’t face the same issues that the other industrial sectors do. Our students leave school with a working knowledge of CAD and the variety of AM technologies they may encounter. We all know that the key is getting the information out there to those who don’t know what’s going on. I’m looking at some of the people on this panel and wondering is that not part of your remit?
PU: It is. We’ve recently had a meeting with nine of the trade associations representing sectors like healthcare and metals castings. Their memberships have such a broad reach right down to the company that doesn’t want to be splashed around the headlines, they just want to get on and do the job. Those nine associations represent about 20,000 manufacturers, you only need a small number of those to actually say that there is something in AM for them for the industry to take off. We’ve got the publicly available specifications, we can disseminate that down to all those SMEs to help them and in return, we need their feedback What’s their stumbling blocks? We know from the strategy, what the 26 major specific hurdles were, but we need an update on that.
The way that we have government funding really is focused more on the research and innovation, rather than on adoption. Take what the team at KTN has done, a very small team, their breakfast meetings now working alongside the MTC have done a fantastic job of getting out into the community. But that was a small amount of money compared to the £200 million that we spent on research and innovation, which was correct but now we need to focus on adoption.
DOC: Nicole, when you’re talking to these SMEs at the breakfast meetings what are the recurring themes?
NB: When you get a good technology agnostic applications engineer walk the production line with an SME manufacturer armed with some good case studies, that really makes a difference. If you can show them that they can replace their storeroom full of jigs and fixtures with digital versions and can have assemblies of parts consolidated, and they can see the real money-saving productivity improvements, then you’re preaching to the converted. But maybe we don’t have enough of those applications engineers.
JR: So often, in my experience, we’ve had people come to us with a CAD file of an object that they would love to be able to 3D print. If that file is 3D printable, they take one look at the cost and think it’s not for me. Meanwhile, I know back at the factory, there are 50 other objects that they will not have identified that are much better candidates to get going on. Those kind of house calls from the KTN are incredibly powerful. We need a little army.
