In a university lab in Zurich, Switzerland, an idea is discussed, a PhD is pursued, the required research is carried out and a 3D printing company is born.
9T Labs' CEO Martin Eichenhofer is the one who earned the PhD at ETH Zurich, noticing it was a good opportunity to build a solid foundation to a technology he had initially discussed with his brother. In the first semester, he met Geovanni Cavolina, now the company’s Chief Business Development Officer, and Chester Houwink, the Chief Operating Officer. Immediately developing a rapport, they would talk about how their composite 3D printing process would be able to substitute for metal, how they could find a play in a host of vertical markets, and how, with the facilities at their disposal, they could bring to market a platform that enabled load carrying, series production parts.
“My entire PhD was geared towards the processing aspects of what does it really take to go into series production using this kind of [fibre-reinforced] material. It’s about how well the layers bond together; how many imperfections you have in the part, like void content, interlaminar strength; what kind of processing speed can we achieve; productivity and economics,” Eichenhofer lists. “What does it take to produce a load carrying, series production part?”
His answer to that is the Red Series, which 9T Labs had intended to showcase at trade fairs throughout the spring before the COVID-19 outbreak curtailed the events calendar. The Red Series is comprised of a Build module to manufacture a fibre preform and Fusion module which fuses the preform printed parts together by applying pressure and heat of up to 400°C. The Build unit boats a build volume of 350 x 270 x 250 mm (matched by the Fusion module), a heated build chamber up to 100°C and is equipped with a dual extruder that deposits a neat plastic filament and a reinforcing carbon fibre (up to 60% fibre volume content) made from prepreg tape at temperatures of up to 400°C.
“We want to have access to the existing material portfolios, access to the material off the shelf, so we can ensure our customers a global supply chain and competitive pricing needed for series production. That’s why we’re using tape as a feedstock and making it into a filament,” Eichenhofer explains. "Our proprietary manufacturing processes allows us to process this tape feedstock material but still remain high resolution and the ability to place filaments along curved trajectories."
9T Labs
9T Labs' Red Series.
9T Labs' Red Series.
The company is targeting the aerospace, automotive, MedTech, automation, luxury and leisure markets, with the spectrum of applications going from load carrying brackets for aircraft interior, to surgical devices, mountain bike parts and watch frame components. 9T recently launched a metal substitution use case which saw carbon fibre-reinforced PEKK used in place of titanium to produce a helicopter door hinge component in collaboration with the Univeristy of Applied Sciences Northwester Switzerland. Using the Red Series, a weight reduction of 80% was achieved and, based on 1,000 of these parts being additively manufactured per year, the cost would come down by 28%. Identical costs savings have been projected for a luxury watch case additively manufactured in the same material.
With shipping of the Red Series not due until September, the company has a team of application engineers working with existing and new customers to identify and develop use cases. This team, Eichenhofer says, is set to grow quickly in the next year, and, despite the sizeable build volume of its Red Series, small components are the focus.
“We have to focus on parts which are economically viable in series production and those are the smaller parts,” he says. “If you divided the target price of a part by volume, there is a clear trend towards smaller parts having a higher ratio. This higher ratio enables us to figure out real commercial business cases, not pure ideological pitches which might be true in ten years or never materialise. All the business cases we’re seeing have a couple of hundred up to a couple of thousand parts and so the technology is geared towards the production of up to 10,000 parts. For that, customers might need multiple machines or entire print farms.”
9T is to offer its Red Series as a subscription service in which users can access the Build and Fusion modules, the portfolio of PA 12 and PEKK neat filament and carbon fibre reinforcement materials, 9T’s Fibrify software platform and 100 hours of engineering services a year. Updated hardware can be swapped in for older platforms; the material options are set to grow with the onboarding of new material families and material suppliers; the engineering services are designed to help customers identify, design and validate applications; while the software suite enables tailored fibre orientation, Finite Element Analysis (FEA) tools to optimise designs and process monitoring capabilities.
9T Labs
9T Labs application
A partnership with ANSYS has seen the software company’s Composite PrepPost (ACP) platform integrated with Fibrify to allow complex fibre lay-ups developed in Fibrify to be converted into a finite element model. Harnessing the simulation capabilities of the ACP platform is allowing 9T to facilitate ‘digital twin’ workflows.
“Here, we can map the material behaviour in the software, and we can have optimisation loops to find the most optimal design before actually going into the physical world to produce the part,” Eichenhofer says. “What most 3D printing companies are doing is producing a gross spectrum of prototype design by an educated guess before choosing the one design that works empirically. That’s not what we want. The way we imagine this workflow is all digital, you can perform everything in the simulation environment in our software to find the best design for your application before you start prototyping the first null-series parts. This allows customers to have superior parts faster and with significantly less resources employed.”
The company is also developing a tool to be integrated into Fibrify that will help users calculate exactly how much manufacturing and post-processing capacity they will need for their applications. It will allow manufacturers to add multiple applications into their production planning over a period of time and then, thanks to 9T’s business model, add more hardware to their subscription as required.
This business model, along with the product offering, has been refined in the last few months with the help of Bertrand Humel van der Lee and Andreas Wuellner who joined the 9T Labs Board amid a $4.3m seed funding round. The cash is being leveraged to finish the R&D on the Red Series product, making shipments later this year and marketing the offering, while the addition of Bertrand and Andreas adds some extensive experience to the team. The former brings broad expertise in sales, services and marketing and previously held the Chief Customer Operations Officer position at EOS - a position he is now occupying at SLM Solutions - while the latter led the composites business division of SGL Carbon up until the end of 2019.
9T Labs
9T Labs team.
9T Labs team.
“Bertrand was a key figure behind the evaluation of the business model and how to create value through our offering for the customers,” Eichenhofer assesses. “And Andreas, he comes from the composite world with a broad technical and business understanding. He knows all about the composites industry's peculiarities, market trends, and therefore he was a key figure in shaping the product offering.”
On reaching that final product, developing and commercialising it, 9T Labs becomes another company offering fibre-reinforced 3D printed parts, joining the likes of Markforged, Anisoprint and Desktop Metal. Between the four companies and their technologies, there are many similarities, be it in the size of the build volumes, the gantry print systems, or the continuous fibre materials used. A difference, however, is that with 9T Labs feeling its technology is ready to be used immediately for series production applications, it is not set to challenge the already 'fierce competition' within the prototyping or tooling and fixturing markets.
"That is not our market. We are building a technology for series production of end use parts, having completely different customer requirements," Eichenhofer says. "9T Labs is confident that its technology, and business model, can penetrate the markets with the proprietary two-step process to allow for a new era in fibre composite part design and metal substitution."
In lieu of showcasing the Red Series at upcoming trade fairs, 9T Labs is explaining the capabilities of its product offering on a series of webinars.
