It was the first working day after the Easter mini break, the industry’s biggest user group conference loomed with big news surely to follow, but before that, from seemingly nowhere, two companies spun out of another.
One presented to the world an identity, a new 3D printing process it planned to commercialise, and appraisal from an industry expert to back it up. The other came with a name, an indication towards its origins, a website which to this day has never been updated, and a plea for partners.
Vulcan Labs, the latter of the two, was an independent entity for just more than ten months, its acquirer first opening negotiations in the summer of 2018 and completing the deal by February 2019. It marked the converging of two paths, one trekked by a man and the other by his investments.
David Leigh was half a decade into his career when he established service bureau Harvest Technologies which would eventually be absorbed by Stratasys as it laid the foundations for its Direct Manufacturing business. He assumed the role of VP of Engineering in this on-demand manufacturing business, before moving across to help steer Stratasys’ Emerging Technologies division. It was here where Project Vulcan was born, where some projects remain, where others have fallen away, and where, in the spring of 2018, two were considered ready to go it alone. Stratasys divested from Evolve Additive and Vulcan Labs on the same day. Ahead, Leigh was about to bump into some familiar faces.
In 2009, EOS had struck a strategic partnership with Advanced Laser Materials (ALM), a company Leigh had helped to fund. Two years later, ALM acquired a service provider called Integra, a company Leigh helped to fund and found. And 12 months ago, as Leigh and his team had an eye out for investment, the EOS family was reaching for its wallet yet again.
"EOS knows how to make the car, but they don't drive it."
It was an alliance that made perfect sense for Leigh, who was CEO of Vulcan, whose career had always featured powder bed fusion technologies, and who has spent most of his life in the Lone Star State where all the main characters of this narrative have a residence.
"It was a no-brainer," Leigh tells TCT. "There’s a personal history there, we’re located in Central Texas, about ten minutes away from the ALM office and about 40 minutes from the EOS North America office in Pflugerville, and there’s technical competence. We were actually working on technology that was directly correlated to the P 400.”
The P 400 – or the Integra P 400 to give it its full title – has been task numero uno for Vulcan as it was integrated into the EOS ‘ecosystem’. The machine was officially unveiled two months prior to the acquisition, with the Vulcan team immediately being deployed to help with the development and commercialisation of the product. It has meant the work Vulcan had been doing these last few years has been put on the back burner, as Leigh explains.
“[The P 400] project has absorbed most of our energy and effort. From a practical standpoint, it’s a ‘jack of all trades, master of none’ kind of thing. We could do a little bit of everything and get nothing done or we could focus. We have hit the pause button on what we were working with at Vulcan.”
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EOS' North American HQ in Pflugerville, Texas.
Pause
The Integra P 400 is being marketed by EOS as a machine with advanced capabilities and one that is easily serviceable. It can reach build temperatures of up to 300°C – among the highest temperature ranges yet across EOS’ product range – which has opened customers up to a host of PEK, PPS, polycarbonate and Nylon 6 materials that they haven’t been able to use before. Meanwhile, infrared thermal imaging cameras are a key part of the machine’s real-time feedback loop, helping to monitor and adjust temperatures to reduce deviation in the parts being produced.
It is easy to service for a number of reasons, according to Cary Baur, the Manager of Applications Development, Polymers at EOS North America. Among them is the ability to access the machine remotely – per the users’ permission – assess the issues and advise accordingly. The machine has also been designed so the parts most likely to need maintenance are easy to access – no more pulling out 100 components to fix just one.
One new component in the platform is a dual roller, which has been implemented in place of the blade recoater EOS machines typically possess. This new system allows for quicker recoating and the ability to smooth out carbon- and glass-filled materials as well as process softer materials that don’t tend to flow too easily.
Baur explains: “One of those rollers is counter-rotating, so the direction it moves effectively moves your material in a way that’s able to fluff it up and allow it to maintain motion. Our first recoat step is focused on moving the material, the second is flattening it in a way and compressing it in a way that’s repeatable. Those two innovations, as well as the expansion of the temperature range to 300°C, enabled many more materials that haven’t been achievable in the past.”
The Integra P 400 has been in a select number of customers’ hands for nearly six months now. It has been brought to market in response to an urgency from customers to enable the processing of higher-performing materials, taking advantage of the greater mechanical, thermal, and chemical stabilities of the likes of PEK and Nylon 11 materials, to open up application opportunities.
To truly exploit these new capabilities, users are working side by side with EOS through its Additive Minds division, of which Baur manages on the polymer side. The Additive Minds team engages with customers immediately upon the sale of a machine, working to develop custom strategies in order to go from concept to real-life part, and do so based on business cases around the desired production metrics.
While Additive Minds opens a dialogue with users of the Integra P 400, Vulcan Labs is in the background.
“Their role has been to come in and help us drive quality in our production, help us drive best manufacturing practices, install those processes needed to actually serial produce a machine which is something that EOS North America has not done before,” says Baur.
“At their helm is David Leigh, who’s a big name in the market and is helping to drive that organisation in North America. It’s been a great addition that has sped up the timeline tremendously of the P 400 and installed confidence in our customers that we have someone in a team here that is going to be driving that type of reliability.”
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EOS Integra P 400
EOS Integra P 400.
The Integra P 400 is intended to be made available globally as part of the EOS polymer portfolio, but hurdles lie ahead. First, the company needs to achieve CE certification to guarantee it conforms with the health, safety and environmental standards for products sold in Europe. Then, there’s the sizeable task of training an entire global service and support base as production and sales scale, and finally the more tedious one of completing and filing the required documentation.
Next year looks likely, but what’s Vulcan’s job then?
Resume
“We see us focusing on the P 400 throughout the fall, but once the fall is done and we’ve launched the product and feel good about it, then we’ll start working on Vulcan,” Leigh picks back up.
What that work entails is ‘primary differentiators.’ The reason EOS has sought to tie Vulcan Labs into its ecosystem is because of similar outlooks on the areas for improvement on powder bed fusion processes, while differing on the angle they’re coming from. Leigh analogises the relationship between Carroll Shelby and Ford Motor Company to churn out the Shelby GT Mustang: “We at Vulcan, we’ve been good practitioners, we know how to drive this car pretty well, but we’ve not made it, and EOS knows how to make the car really well, but they don’t drive it.”
Vulcan has previously spent time looking at how to process metal powders at higher temperatures, has explored the use of harnessing other gases than Argon to operate metal machines at higher or lower pressures, and has considered how to ensure unused powder is recycled and re-used without being exposed to oxygen. Automatically controlling the speed, power and temperature of lasers has also been on the Vulcan agenda, while work on the implementation of automation technologies, to allow for build platforms and the like to be swapped out overnight for example, is another key focus.
This is just the broad assessment of activities Leigh is able to part with without compromising any of the company’s IP. Vulcan is set to work somewhat as an incubation lab inside of EOS, leveraging its knowledge and expertise to identify and address what can move powder bed fusion technology forward. New materials can lead to new applications, closed loop control can lead to better quality inspection, and more applications produced with better quality will surely lead to growth.
Vulcan will supplement and be supplemented in this mission by the EOS ‘ecosystem’, which includes business units like Additive Minds, the consultative arm; AMCM, the customised machines division; AM Ventures, the investment group bringing innovative start-ups into the fold; and Life Cycle Solutions, the aftermarket support unit.
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Team Vulcan at EOS.
Team Vulcan at EOS.
In fact, collaboration between Vulcan and some of these groups is already well under way. Additive Minds and AMCM have recently worked with clients to reduce the build volume of their M 290 platforms because they were generally not using it to full capacity. Hearing from more and more customers that this new modification of the product would be of interest to them, Vulcan has been assisting the teams as EOS prepares roll this out globally.
There will be much more of this. Leigh likens it to developing a new braking system for one of those Shelby GT Mustangs he referenced and upgrading the car months or years after the sale. In the 3D printing landscape, that might be new laser technology or automated scanner calibration. Vulcan will be one of the teams deployed to do much of the groundwork in developing these new capabilities, before handing off to Life Cycle Solutions to install them.
"We’re starting to slightly influence some of the product development at EOS."
The ecosystem is in full flow. It receives around $1m a week for technology R&D, is integrating around ten new start-ups per year, and is pencilled in to be the lasting legacy of EOS founder Hans Langer. Vulcan Labs is now among the componentry of this network, complementing the offering of Additive Minds, Life Cycle Solutions, AMCM and co, to provide enhanced support to its customers.
It is likely Vulcan will do so without external recognition. As Langer told TCT earlier this year, customers aren't all that concerned with what goes on in the background, who did what and how or why: "‘Give me this part for this price, I don’t care how you do it,’” he imitated, and so there's less inclination to put the acquired company's brand on product output.
Vulcan is playing a team game now, performing to the order of a vast network that operates across the world. Not every detail of each bug the unit fixes, or each technical breakthrough the unit achieves, will be made public, but make no mistake, Vulcan is contributing.
“We’re starting to slightly influence some of the product development at EOS by travelling over there and working with them,” Leigh divulges. “We will probably have one or two unique solutions, that may [or may not] be transparent to the customer that came from an idea from Vulcan.
“A lot of things that we were working on will probably work their way into the ecosystem without having a label to say, ‘this is made by Vulcan’. It won’t have a badge. We’re all one group, we’re working on independent things that hopefully can be scaled within the group. The P 400 as an example, our goal is to produce x number per year. If we get to 10x, if we need to produce ten times what we can do here in Pflugerville, more than likely we will leverage the global procurement and global logistics. Who knows, it may end up being a great platform for Asia and we decide to then launch an Asian-specific manufacturing centre.
“AM is going global, EOS is now becoming more of a global company than just a Bavarian company, and we’re starting to grow up and act like that.”
