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Essentium HSE 280i HT.
Essentium intends to launch a parts manufacturing services offering based on its High Speed Extrusion (HSE) 3D printing technology called ePOD – Essentium Parts On Demand.
The company has previously offered parts production services on a limited basis for select customers, but will now introduce a structured on-demand service offering in 2023.
This offering will see Essentium partner with existing additive manufacturing service bureau providers and/or manufacturing marketplaces.
“We are starting, for 2023, to do services,” Essentium CEO Blake Teipel told TCT at Formnext. “We’ve done services in a limited – I would call it opportunistic – way in the past, but in '22 we have done a business model write up, we’ve got Board approval, we’ve gotten quotes back from seven service bureaus, we’ve harmonised on [a significant number] of geometries. That’s a huge amount of research.”
The groundwork has already included a first customer use study, with activity set to pick up in the new year. By partnering with service providers and marketplaces, Essentium’s role will be to provide HSE 3D printing capacity to existing bureaus, rather than set up quoting and job management tools independently.
Per Teipel, the company's motivation for establishing ePOD is twofold.
“The number one is it’s helping customers with their education because, in some cases, the actual user or the buyer is new,” Teipel said. “So, you have to restart that credibility process. ‘Here’s a part, here’s a credible cost structure,’ all that. The secondary reason is because if the world is worried about rising interest rates, and maybe recessions, then maybe the world’s not buying capital assets, but the world is buying parts. It’s strategic for us, but it’s also helping to build an unmet market need of the education of the user.”
Essentium, which initially started as a provider of polymer materials, introduced its HSE additive manufacturing system in 2018. Since then, Essentium’s technology has been deployed by the likes of Keselowski Advanced Manufacturing, VirTex, Axle Box Innovations and the US Air Force.
This adoption of the HSE technology, plus plans to expand into DLP and metal 3D printing, helped to attract the interest of SPAC Atlantic Coastal to take the company onto the stock exchange, only for the merger agreement to be terminated due to ‘market conditions.’ Market instability since the COVID pandemic has continued and continued to have an impact on the sales of manufacturing equipment. In CONTEXT’s latest market intelligence report, Global Head of Analysis Chris Connery commented: “With fears of a recession looming, cautious CFOs have begun to rethink capital expenditures across many industries and are instead pushing out order.”
Essentium can relate to that. According to Teipel, Essentium has been in discussions with prospective buyers in the aerospace sector whose budgetary approval to purchase a HSE machine has been granted and then rescinded multiple times.
“The most recent communication I had with these guys, and these guys are at tier one, was like, ‘yes, we’re excited about the machine. We got budgetary approval for the 2024 budget cycle.’ So, they can’t buy a machine a 200,000 USD solution until 2024,” Teipel said. “And that’s just one example. There are many other examples that I have where decisions are pushed out to the point where they are non-actionable decisions. The economic uncertainty is a very large driver of that.”
And the solution?
“You build a services business.”
At Formnext, Essentium also announced it is now working to provide certificates of conformance for every spool of filament it sells.
The company has moved to offer this level of material certification in response to demand from the US Air Force, and feedback from a recently commissioned independent research study carried out by Dimensional Research. This survey retrieved comments and data from 150 industrial AM users.
“We theorised that the capability of the material alone is not enough,” Teipel told TCT. “You’ve got to have a capable material, but you’ve also got to have a traceable material. That was our theory. So, we asked this to the folks in the survey, we said, ‘okay, how important is material certification to you in your daily lives?’ If you’re FDA or FAA, certification is important, we know that, but if you’re not in those industry sectors does certification still matter for you? And 80% of respondents said it was either very important or critically important to have material certification for them.”
This level of certification is being applied to all 25 existing material grades, plus a new material to come next year, in line with the ISO and AS9100 quality processes. Those quality certifications, plus ITAR registration, have been awarded to Essentium’s filament manufacturing facility in Austin, Texas, with the HSE printers providing data streams from its servo motors.
“It's closed loop. So, the motor itself tells you, ‘was I accurate? Did I produce the geometry properly within this area? Did I have the right extrusion temperature?’ The machine is smart, and you get a file for each part you print but the gap was, for us, in the middle of the spool,” Teipel said. “So, now in 2022, from here on out, for all 25 grades of material that we have produced, every single spool in our facility, you have a QR code, and you can get the certificate of conformance for the material on that spool. Not the material in the batch, not material from that resin class, not the material that was produced that day, the material on this spool. Each spool. We are putting out hundreds of thousands of spools a year. But now, to our knowledge, we are the only ones that you can scan and you can get the certificate for that specific spool.”
Also in 2023, Essentium is set to release a flexible, high temperature aerospace material developed in collaboration with Lehmann & Voss.
