HP Materials Making it Matter
Testing is carried out in the Open Applications & Materials Lab.
HP has embarked on a quest to reinvent manufacturing. The company first established in the garage of a rented Palo Alto home in 1939 now stands as one of the giants of technology, worth around $50bn. It has been aware of 3D printing for more than two decades but waited until its engineers developed something that could be 'truly disruptive' before entering the market. Such are the riches of HP; the $6bn 3D printing market wasn't all that persuasive. The $12trn manufacturing one, however...
“Nothing has really changed in manufacturing for about 100 hundred years,” HP CEO, Dion Weisler said at the company’s Reinventing Manufacturing joint event with Deloitte on 24th August 2017. “There’s a meaningful way to make a very broad impact on the way companies all around the world design, procure, manufacture and deliver their products to customers.
“When you 3D print, complexity is free. That enables you to change the design in a very different way, and so now companies all around the world can think very differently about how they manufacture in the future.”
The cornerstone of these efforts to disrupt manufacturing – Weisler hopes in a similar vein to Netflix’s disruption of media and Amazon’s disruption of retail – is its Multi Jet Fusion (MJF) 3D printer, backed by the Open Applications and Materials Lab which launched this Spring in Corvallis, Oregon. The size of the task at hand is best exemplified in the comparison of material selection between 3D printing and injection moulding.
“If you look at how the world works today with injection moulding, there are tens of thousands of materials. Maybe even more than that – 50,000,” begins Dr Tim Weber, Head of the Open Applications and Materials Lab. “And people who aren’t engineers and who haven’t played in that space [might ask] ‘why are there so many materials?’ It’s because each material company tailors a material for a specific application, for a specific customer.”
It is a widely-held opinion that material selection has held additive manufacturing back. It forms one of six ‘strategy levers’ that will help HP ‘unlock the market’ (others include product capabilities; material price; design for additive; supply chain; and standards and regulations). While HP is a daring, confident and ambitious company, it’s also a self-aware one. Rather than go it alone in a state of hubris, it has recruited the likes of BASF; Evonik; Arkema; and Henkel to work in the Open Applications and Materials Lab to develop materials for its MJF platform.
HP Materials Making it Matter spreadability
Checking the spreadability of new powder.
“Four or five materials is not going to cut it. We need thousands of materials,” stresses Weber. “This is where the open materials platform was born. There’s no way we have the resources to do that. Materials companies have been doing it for years and years on their own, and we got to the point where we want to have an open materials platform, and let materials companies do what they’ve done, which is tailor materials for their specific applications.”
Participation in the lab is expected to grow quickly and significantly. Weber says HP is confident another ten companies will sign up and is in communication with a further 40 after that. Currently, on any given day, you can expect between 10 and 20 people in the lab carrying out tests and other experimentations. Colour-coded lab coats are used to differentiate between companies, designed to avoid any accidental spillages of information that might compromise respective intellectual properties. It’s a controlled environment, but an unconstrained one.
HP is keen to emulate the Apple App Store, giving developers the creative freedom to produce materials they feel will be purposeful. Weber’s team will then certify it through its Materials Development Kit, making sure the MJF system supports it, and it meets certain quality and reliability standards. The Materials Development Kit is a multi-step process thought up by HP to standardise the results of the research and development taking place in the lab.
The first step will see the material developer make a batch of 100g to make sure it can be turned into a powder and spread. Then, the company will need to produce around 5 kg of the material for a simple fusing test in a powder bed of 6 inches cubed. If it is compatible with the MJF system, and its fusing and detailing agents, the material can be tested on the third step after a few iterations to make clear what the melt and crystallisation points are. This third phase sees 50 kg of the material tested against the Material Build Unit, Weber’s team assessing how it runs through the delivery system – refinements may be needed at this stage. Finally, if the material has come through the three steps, between 500 kg and 1,000 kg will be run through an MJF 4200 and parts will be printed. Though the concept is in place, Weber says the Materials Development Kit still needs stabilising.
HP
HP Materials Roadmap
HP's 3D Printing Materials Roadmap
It is partly the reason why HP won’t set time frames against its Materials Roadmap. The company has released a brief insight into some of the material types it is looking to release. Nine branches are displayed, covering the PA12 High Reusability that is already available, as well as elastomers, polyamides, thermoplastics, commodity plastics, and high-performance materials. Each of these types or 'platforms' as Weber refers to them, will have some variations each tailored to specific applications.
“You can imagine as we have stabilised our business, as we have stabilised our hardware, and we’ve learned to certify, we’ll start to see a lot of variations, first of the polyamides,” Weber expands. “We will sooner than later introduce a number of elastomers, probably GPE, GPU, polyurethane – we are working on some low-cost manufacturing material that will be coming out shortly. We’re not throwing a date out there, but they are on their way, being delivered in the building I am in today, as we speak.”
The segment of HP’s roadmap revealed to the public gives a fair reflection of what is to be developed in the Open Applications and Materials Lab, but doesn’t quite tell the whole story. Moving forward, and in addition to the many variations of each platform, Weber expects to see more work done on coloured materials – even white – which will do away with the ‘Any colour as long as its black’ policy it has borrowed from early 20th century Ford. He also confirms HP’s partners are exploring conductive inks to enable the printing of circuit boards; static charge dissipation of plastics to prevent charges building up in electrical parts; and in HP Labs in Palo Alto, investigations are taking place in relation to metals and ceramics - In October, the company gave further details into its plans for metal in 2018.
Together, they all contribute to an extensive roadmap and a potentially prolific 3D printing material development program: “We can probably do a couple of new platforms a year, but the ability to do many, many variations for those at the same time,” concludes Weber. “That’s where the power of the certification program will come in. I expect companies to do those variations with their customers and I think we’ll see an exponential growth of materials as we move ahead.” An approach HP believes will help to reinvent manufacturing.
This article was initially published in Volume 25, Issue 5 of TCT Magazine Europe Edition in September 2017.
