Interview: MakerBot & KIMYA open up on the Method 3D printing materials programme

'We want to make sure each materials partner brings something new and fills a gap on the Method platform.'

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Years ago, several even before this compact combination of plastic casing, metal nozzle and printed circuit boards was developed, an add-on like that of MakerBot’s Experimental Extruder would have been akin to a new accessory on a toy for its predominantly hobbyist user base.  

The ability to easily fit the attachment to the machine, the interchangeable nozzle assembly and the suite of additional software settings would have allowed them to ‘plug and play’ and explore a myriad of new features on their desktop printer to make gadgets and replacement household parts.

Today, though, the Experimental Extruder’s ability to reach temperatures of up to 300°C, the long liquefier integrated into its design and the 100°C heated build chamber it deposits material into is instead of more significance to transport companies, robotics manufacturers, electronics players, and perhaps many more too.

Exactly what kind of material is pulled from beneath the build area of the MakerBot Method where the spools are located and squeezed out of the recently-commercialised Experimental Extruder is now, more than ever, up to the user.

“The Experimental Extruder essentially turns the MakerBot Method into an open platform,” MakerBot’s VP of Product Development Johan-Till Broer begins. “We’ve seen an explosion of innovation in the filament market and many companies are rapidly developing new materials.”

Now ‘100% open’ to third party materials, MakerBot is wanting to take full advantage of the innovation it has identified. It explains the link up with BASF and LEHVOSS, Mitsubishi Chemical and Jabil Engineered Materials, and Polymaker and KIMYA, all of whom are working to optimise and qualify materials on the Method platforms. MakerBot’s materials programme was launched in November with VP of Engineering Dave Veisz emphasising the desire for a “wide funnel of materials,” and Broer caveating that with, “but we want to keep the group of material partners fairly small.”

 “We’ve had many meetings with each of [the partners] to make sure there is a good exchange of ideas and insights into the technologies and roadmaps. We want to make sure each of them brings something new and fills a gap on the platform,” Broer explains.

“I completely agree,” KIMYA’s Business Development Director Pierre-Antoine Pluvinage adds. “We said, ‘we want to join this programme, but only if there’s not hundreds of partners. This was a condition because it doesn’t make any sense. You can’t work with [this many] partners because they’ll have the same materials, [whereas] we will [all] bring different value to this programme.”

That value is to come in the form of technical and high-performance materials like Polymaker’s PolyMax Polycarbonate material, which boasts high heat resistance, toughness and strength; Jabil’s PETg ESD, which is an Electrostatic Dissipative (ESD) material suitable for parts that meet sensitive electronics and could be damaged by electrostatic discharge; Mitsubishi Chemical’s DIRABIO, a material with a higher chemical and scratch resistance than polycarbonate; and KIMYA’s ABS ESD, which is filled with carbon nanotubes and suited to applications that require protection against electrostatic discharge. The PolyMax PC is offered as a material that can be used in a variety of transport applications, while the DURABIO material is suited to housings, interior and exterior décor and the automotive space. There are more in the pipeline, with each materials supplier garnering feedback from their industrial partners in a bid to develop solutions to problems.

"Expanding the range of materials that we give engineers helps them to win confidence in their company."

KIMYA operates under the Armor Group and was established in 2017 in response to ‘shifts in manufacturing processes which Armor is familiar with.’ Through Armor’s comprehensive network as a 100-year old business and its own three years in existence, KIMYA has ties to the electronics, transport and food industries and has set about optimising its vast resources to deliver standard, technical and high-performance materials for 3D printing equipment.

“With MakerBot, we wanted to start with the technical ones because they bring added value to the final application,” Pluvinate says. “The ABS ESD, for example, is a material we developed based on demand before the partnership with MakerBot in electronic applications in Europe – it started with one company that had a specific need and then we went to see others that could have the same need. They actually started using 3D printing because we brought them this solution. It’s the same for the PTG Carbon and ABS Carbon.”

KIMYA’s ABS Carbon is reinforced with 30% chopped carbon fibre, to enhance the stiffness and strength of the ABS material, while reducing the weight. Though only recently optimised for the MakerBot Method platform, All Axis Robotics has already found a use case for it.

All Axis is a machine shop not only additively manufacturing robotic end affecters for its internal use but now for other companies too. It is using the ABS Carbon material developed by KIMYA to print dual grippers, which can pick up two objects at once, because of the material’s strength to weight ratio. Meanwhile, Jabil’s TPE SEBS 1300 95A flexible material is being used to print grippers that pick up sensitive metal parts and All Axis has also additively manufactured a replacement fan part for a CNC machine with the PolyMax PC material. This part is typically made out of aluminium and moves at a very high RPM to blow away excess material and coolant inside the machine. 

“All Axis Robotics is a very good example for how a company can significantly advance the types of applications [they develop] when they get access to more materials,” Broer notes. “Their focus is on developing automated robotic solutions for machine shops so a robotic arm can pick up certain metal parts, put them into a CNC machine and when it’s done machining, take them out so that the machine operation can run overnight, 24 hours a day, and through that they get very significant cost savings.

“When you think about robot end-effectors, they're a natural fit for 3D printing because they’re small quantities of parts that are customised based on what the robot arm is doing.”

Such is the size of the Method machines, small quantities are all MakerBot can target. But work is already underway with industrial companies like ABB, who are said to be producing parts, some of which are end-use, within an internal service centre it has set up which distributes components to a host of departments across the company. MakerBot also says it is receiving a lot of interest from the rail industry – a market being penetrated by parent company Stratasys, while KIMYA is also a partner of Alstom – and manufacturing aids, like jigs and fixtures, in a variety of different industries, will also likely be a big market.

Among the companies harnessing MakerBot technology for tooling components is materials partner Jabil, who use “quite a bit of their technology” for this purpose according to VP of Digital Manufacturing John Dulchinos, who also told TCT the reason Jabil partnered with MakerBot was that: “we like the product direction they’re going: opening their platform to third party materials like ours and starting to increase the functionality of the printer.”

While these kinds of applications become more and more viable as the likes of Jabil and KIMYA develop and qualify their materials on the Method platforms, what the recent developments mean for companies only making prototypes with the technology isn’t lost on MakerBot. Most 3D printers can do the job of validating the form and fit of a design, but to really understand the functionality and performance, users often require a high-quality material that’s not too far away from what they’ll use to manufacture the parts.

“By enabling all of these additional materials, more engineers will be able to use the same material that they will be using for the final part in functional prototyping and if you’re able to [do that], you will get much better, much closer results to what you can expect from the end product,” Broer says.

Providing benefits like that is why the materials development programme has been established. What’s more, with a small contingent, MakerBot suggests it will be easier to understand ‘what’s on the horizon’; that is, MakerBot can determine which aspects of the hardware requires further development - be it the custom design electronics board, the chamber or the extruder design - in line with the materials its partners are working on, and said hardware development can help the materials supplier identify their next optimisations. “We have to bring them the solution, and not just the printer on one side and the material on the other,” Pluvinage offers.

And as the seven companies that make up this programme so far align their roadmaps, existing Method users should be able to begin expanding their application of the technology and new adopters ought to have a better chance of making a success of it too. MakerBot might be beginning to target new markets and, it hopes, facilitate new applications across industry, but it remains a desktop machine vendor. With that, comes an awareness of how its printers often work their way into organisations.

“Many engineers that adopt 3D printing are at the forefront of pushing the limits within their organisations,” finishes Broer. “There’s a bottom-up approach where individual engineers go out and buy a printer, and then face the challenge of convincing their higher management that the 3D printer can actually produce a part that can be used for certain manufacturing applications, for example, on the production line and they can perform in a similar way to parts produced with traditional manufacturing.

“Expanding the range of materials that we give these engineers, helps them to win that confidence.”

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