Star Rapid
Star Rapid Metal 3D Printing Training workshops.
The first of Star Rapid's Metal 3D Printing Training workshops.
“2017 is, I hope, the year that everybody acknowledges the fact there is a massive design-knowledge deficit, a massive design-process deficit out there. If we want to make metal 3D printing really popular, we have to start giving courses on how to design using 3D printing.” – Gordon Styles, Star Rapid Founder, speaking to TCT Magazine in December 2016.
To be built up and then knocked down is par for the course whenever someone or something passes through the limelight. The hyperbolic estimations serve as only a future context to measure that the subject isn’t all that it was cracked up to be. It offers a new angle when the first one becomes obsolete. It leaves the subject at a crossroads, in need of a solution to return to the heady status it once enjoyed.
The outcries for the educating of engineers and designers is not only cited as a reason for 3D printing not living up to the hype, it is also a product of it. It turned out the hype was ill-measured. While evangelists of the technology were predicting a printer in every home, 3D printing was about to enter a transitional phase, from a ‘hobbyist environment to a hardcore manufacturing’ one, as Gordon Styles would put it in a second interview with TCT in August 2017. There was an increased interest in 3D printing, and sales briefly shot up. Now, with some manufacturers’ sales coming down by 25-40%, the industry is experiencing a hangover to its celebrity.
Late Registration
Many have concluded that education is the solution. Plastic processes were deemed simple enough not to need it, but the industry has been caught out supposing metal processes would be much the same. They are ‘fundamentally different’ – so much so, Styles believes mentioning them in the same breath is to do both a disservice. Now, it has been realised the approach for metal printing needs to be different.
Firstly, extra consideration must be given to the design. With plastic parts, thinner designs are printed using SLA or SLS platforms, thicker parts with multi-jet modelling technologies. If needed, supports can be used and easily removed by hand. Users can move on from inappropriate designs, without having to worry about the financial implications, or the possibility of a part falling to pieces, like with metal. “Once you’ve actually done some building you get it. You really get it. When you see a build fall apart you [realise] you made a classic mistake. And then when you’re designing later in life, you’ll know not to design it like that because the thing will fall apart. It’s practical knowledge,” reasoned Styles back in December 2016.
Then there are the health and safety measures to consider. The latest metal machines have heated print beds and high-powered lasers. The powders used, meanwhile, can be explosive if exposed to oxygen or moisture. Supports can’t be removed by hand if you value your fingers. And parts are built at extremely high temperatures. “If you have these high powered, heated machines, you need to know you cannot build, for example, square horizontal holes greater than 2 mm in size, you need to know that you can’t have overhangs of 3, 4, 5 mm without them having to be supported. Then you have to start cutting those supports off, it’s not like plastic where you can tear them off with your fingers, you’ve got to get some hardcore engineering equipment to get them off,” stressed Styles eight months later.
“From our perspective,” begins Gungor Kara, Director of Global Application and Consulting at EOS, “[education is] the key element to access the full potential of the technology. The situation in the past, the educational programmes [have been] connected to universities, and the professional training for experienced engineers in companies was missing.”
By educating, manufacturers are hoping to enamour designers and engineers with the additive processes. The theory is that with more people engaged, sales will pick up, and manufacturers can reinvest these funds to ensure the industry’s future.
“If people can design for the process, they can find more and more appropriate applications for metal 3D printing,” Styles adds. “For the health of the industry generally, we need to educate people, and by doing so, we will make [the industry] more profitable. We will invest more back into products and back into the machines, and ultimately, the customer will get [better] results. I think it’s a symbiotic relationship and it all starts with education.”
25.5 Education feature Added Scientific
A for effort
Nine months on from Styles’ plea for education across the board, his company has successfully run the first of an initial three Metal 3D Printing Training workshops. Days earlier, EOS had announced an expansion of its Additive Manufacturing Academia Programme – the 'Scientist' grade seeing a greater focus on metal powders. Additionally, the German company has partnered with the IESE Business School to provide a program on AM and other technologies under the Industry 4.0 umbrella.
Added Scientific followed suit with a series of additive manufacturing (AM) courses, one of which will have an in-depth look at metal 3D printing in November. Meanwhile, in the last 12 months; GE Additive has invested $10m into two educational programmes; the MIT continues its ‘From 3D Printing to the Factory Floor’ annual week-long course; ThreeD Materials is now supporting 100 schools in the implementing and advancing of 3D printing initiatives; Jabil is tackling the ‘definite skills gap’ as Head of Additive Manufacturing, Geoffrey Doyle describes it, by conducting internal webinars to educate its designers. There are plenty more examples too.
Styles is pleased with the collective effort, though he acknowledges the importance of not expecting too much too soon.
“I think [the progress] is excellent,” he assessed. “What you’ll find is as people leave universities and go out into the real world you’ll see that influx of experience with how to design with 3D printing, but that might take five, ten, 15 years until we see that effect.”
Education feature EOS_Academia_program
EOS is one of the companies leading the way in educating the users of additive manufacturing technology.
Another Brick in the Wall
While it might be reassuring to see an industry-wide commitment to education falling into place – something National and International Strategy reports have recommended – it can’t be relied on unilaterally.
Tim Minshall, the Head of the Centre for Technology Management, Department of Engineering, Cambridge University, sees education as a reason, not the reason, additive manufacturing has fell victim to the hype. He is acquainted with Phil Dickens, co-founder of Added Scientific, and Rob Scudamore, two academics involved in the UK National Strategy for Additive Manufacturing.
Minshall cites the 2016 report which, as well as calling for education, found standardisation and characterisation of AM processes to be the biggest problem faced by the industry. Without the processes and the subsequent parts standardised, and without greater communication and information publication from manufacturers, Minshall believes industrial players will remain reluctant to adopt. He compares AM to subtractive technologies, like CNC Machining, and references the decades, and even centuries, of data available to back up their capabilities.
AM is in its infancy, by comparison, there’s not the same information available, and if AM manufacturers have it, they’d sooner garner the commercial advantage it brings than share it with the world. It has an indirect impact on the education that is offered to designers and engineers.
The CECIMO European Additive Manufacturing Strategy, published in June 2017, provided this honest verdict on AM training initiatives in Europe: “Education systems across European countries have at time shown signs of obsolescence. Educators find [it] difficult to catch up with the fast-paced developments of AM technologies. As a result, skills acquired by entrants to the AM labour market are at risk of misalignment with the current skills’ needs of companies. There is a need for a step change in approaching the preparation of curricula and setting out teaching strategies.”
“The problem is the technology has not completely stabilised. It’s continuing to evolve quite rapidly,” Minshall offers. “Whatever you’re teaching, you need to be aware that it is going to be different in the future. That’s a problem with any emerging technology, but particularly of additive.”
The solution, Minshall suggests, is “taking a joined-up approach. We need to have the people defining the standards for the technology engaged in this. We need to have the people who are designing these education programmes talking to the people who are defining the standards. We need to have the people who are developing the technologies talking to the people doing the standards and the education. I could go on, but it’s having a joined-up approach because as soon as you break that chain, as soon as people start going off and doing things separately, that’s when problems will occur.”
He also believes educating people on how to use the technology is an obvious and necessary service, but it needs to span wider than that, to the business side as well as the technical side. People need to know when to use additive, as well as how. They need to know what the technology can realistically do, and how it could fit into their business model.
Star Rapid
25.5 End of year Report
Burning slowly
Minshall, Styles and Kara alike are passionate about AM and, working with it on a daily basis, know there was logic behind the hype. They hope, like the whole industry does, that it won’t be judged against it forever. They hope that by educating people, additive’s potential can be fulfilled, that aircraft will become lighter and lighter, and jigs and fixtures become more and more efficient.
“It has enormous potential in lots of different areas,” Minshall says, “but the fact is we need to be training people in the core knowledge. If they have the core understanding of how additive works and how it can be either incremental or massively disruptive, that leads to all sorts of benefits. It means that they can use it now, but they will also have the skills to say, 'as these technologies evolve, we can go on a journey with them.'”
“I’m 52 now, so I don’t get excited about much anymore,” Styles jokes, reminiscing about a time when his first SLA machine would keep him awake at night for thinking of how it could make him money whilst he lay in bed. “But I love metal 3D printing. I think it’s a fabulous process. It’s a lot more complicated than plastics 3D printing as a business, but it’s what I’d call a slow burner. It’s something that is going to take a lot more effort, and a lot more time.”
It’s uncommon to associate gradual progression and 3D printing, especially from an advocate of the technology, but it acts as a refreshing realism as opposed to typical marketing spiel. The evaluation came from a man who has been a 3D printing fanatic for over three decades, and one well-placed to offer suggestions on how to direct the future of the technology. Styles, like Kara, believes in education, Minshall does too if it covers all bases and inputs emanate from more parties, and they’re all contributing to the effort. An effort that gets the A grade from Styles.
Education is by no means the single, definitive solution to unlocking additive’s potential – it’s more complex than that. But to educate is to ensure metal additive manufacturing is a slow burner with a bright future, operated by the well-read, and not the cause of mis-controlled explosions and unusable materials, the metal powders handled by the mislead, who think it’s okay to work with the doors open in atmospheric conditions.
TCT Group is committed to accelerating the adoption of 3D technologies and believes inspiring the next generation of product designers and engineers is a key aspect of this mission. At TCT Show, the TCT Inspired Minds programme makes its return and we still have space for schools interested in educating their pupils in an emerging technology. More information on the programme and how to register can be found here.
