Additive manufacturing in the UK: An in-depth overview by Phill Dickens

Where we are, how we got there, and where we might be going.

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It is just over 30 years since the first Additive Manufacturing machines were purchased. Although in those days, they were conceived as a method for making prototypes and the name Rapid Prototyping had not been invented at that point. Therefore, this article will look at how well the UK is exploiting Additive Manufacturing and what our prospects are.

There has been a lot of media attention where the technology is generally known as 3D Printing and this was considerably ramped up in February 2011 when the Economist included an article titled ‘Print me a Stradivarius’. The UK is one of the few countries to have produced a Strategy for Additive Manufacturing. The UK Government also produced an Industrial Strategy in 2017.

You might therefore think that the UK is in a very strong position to exploit AM. I hope to show you where we are, how we have got there, and where we might be going.

How AM developed in the UK

During the 1990’s the UK became one of the best countries to exploit Rapid Prototyping. There was a number of reasons for this but the main ones were that the UK was still very strong in the design of new products and there was a large industrial need for an easy way to make prototypes. There was also a good number of RP evangelists and activities at many universities and we hosted the 1st European Conference on Rapid Prototyping in 1992. By the end of the 1990s Rapid Prototyping had become a normal and integral part of the design process for most manufacturing companies. When Rapid Prototyping was used concurrently with 3D CAD design the whole new product introduction process was re-engineered to enable big design and investment decisions to be made based on digital data and rapidly prototyped parts, eliminating most of the expensively tooled test parts for prototype products and reducing time to market by up to 30%.

In 1996, I undertook a project with Flymo to make prototype impellers for the Hover Mower. These impellers were made by Stereolithography and placed on test where they were rotated at high speed while ball bearings were fired at them to simulate picking up stones in use. The impellers performed so well that we joked that Flymo should get rid of its injection moulding facility and place Stereolithography machines at the head of each assembly line. This then led to a follow on project where we analysed the full cost of various Rapid Prototyping processes versus injection moulding. The results were presented at the 1997 European Stereolithography User group meeting where I showed that for the blades that cut the grass it would be economical to use Rapid Prototyping for up to 6,000 parts. The PowerPoint slide that got most attention was of an image showing a factory full of Stereolithography machines. The salesmen (they were all men!) from 3D Systems got very excited!

This led then to the concept of Rapid Manufacturing. However, it was a poor name to choose because the production rate of Rapid Prototyping machines was much lower than conventional processes and so the name Additive Manufacturing became the norm.

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Several other projects were undertaken to show the economics of Additive Manufacturing but there was a slow uptake in its use in industry for making end-use parts. This was mainly due to people not believing in it as a production process due to poor process consistency, lack of materials, little material data, and limited knowledge of how to exploit AM and new difficulties in inspection and finishing. Some sectors also suffered from a lack of regulatory awareness and standards.

Whilst Additive Manufacturing offers competitive advantage with radical product change and optimisation through the new design freedoms, all at minimal tooling cost, many companies have found that the commercial risk involved in taking this one-way step for end-use products was too great, potentially leaving them with no back-out route if the new solution were to fail for some reason. So we have seen a period of relatively low-risk exploration of Additive Manufacturing in order to build production know-how and commercial confidence. Its use for industrial tooling applications, especially jigs and fixtures is a good example of where this can be done, and indeed is being done.

Development of UK AM Strategy

The first discussions about establishing a UK strategy for Additive Manufacturing occurred in early 2014 following recommendations in the Government’s Manufacturing Foresight Report. By the time the strategy had been published in September 2017 there had been a lot of consultation with many interested parties.

The strategy gave a clear route so that the UK could be the leading nation for exploiting Additive Manufacturing. It identified the barriers to its use and made 26 recommendations for actions that would enable a UK lead. These recommendations could be largely divided into Innovation (new R&D required to overcome technical barriers) or Adoption (helping UK companies to exploit the technology through targeted business support in areas of awareness, workforce development, standards development etc).

Where are we now in the UK?

Although some companies are undertaking lots of Additive Manufacturing, such as Bowman International for bearing cages (typically making around 10,000 parts per month), Renishaw and Attenborough Dental for crowns and bridges, Metron for elite cycles, Croft for filters and GKN for aerospace and automotive components, the vast majority of UK industry is not using the technology.

Paul Unwin (Chair of AM UK) has a very useful analogy: “The awareness deficient is not what it can do but rather how to do it. They know to go to the station to catch the train but don’t know which one, where it’s going, where it will stop and how much the fare is. Of those companies that have the ability to adopt AM they generally have some awareness although it may be inaccurate.  I think there is quite a proportion of manufacturing SME companies that even if there was a compelling fact-based argument, currently they would not have the mental, physical or financial ability to adopt. We all know companies that consider they have parts or products that they think correctly or incorrectly would be suitable via Additive Manufacturing but don’t know how to embark and proceed along the journey. 

"I think this is the bottleneck neck now in the UK. There are a lot of companies too that should not embark on Additive Manufacturing currently without the support/ infrastructure/ ecosystem being enhanced.”

There is little, if any, government acknowledgement of the UK AM Strategy and although the 26 well-considered recommendations were presented, there is a tremendous frustration and feeling of impotency in not being able to put in place mechanisms directly to enable them to be addressed. Any government attention rests with its Industrial Strategy which received mixed reaction from UK industry and any additional time is given to Made Smarter which is the UK answer to Industry 4.0. The Made Smarter pilot in the North West is promoting Additive Manufacturing which is a leading exemplar of one of the main Industrial Digital Technologies. For many manufacturing SME’s their first steps with Industry 4.0 have been, or will be through, Additive Manufacturing.

The Knowledge Transfer Network (funded by Innovate UK) has run a Special Interest Group for Additive Manufacturing which considering the relatively low amount of funding has performed a very useful job. This has included a series of about 20 Breakfast meetings where the business benefits of Additive Manufacturing are shown. The MTC and TWI have both undertaken activity to promote Additive Manufacturing.

It is interesting that the paucity of funding for Adoption contrasts with the good amount of funding for Research and Innovation! The Engineering & Physical Science Research Council (EPSRC) and Innovate UK are the two main bodies that fund Innovation in Additive Manufacturing. EPSRC is currently funding research into Additive Manufacturing at 33 universities and this amounts to about £114m of funding. The three largest centres are University of Nottingham (£24m), University of Sheffield (£10m) and University of Cambridge (£10m). Within all of this EPSRC research the main material group being investigated is metal with 39% of the funding followed by multi-material (34%) and polymer (11%).

The work is more evenly spread across the process categories with Powder Bed Fusion accounting for 23%, Material Jetting at 22% and Hybrid at 20%. It is interesting that the largest sector represented in these projects is Healthcare at 29% while ICT is 17% and Aero is 14%. In addition, there are large sums being spent on Additive Manufacturing research by The Wellcome Trust, NIHR i4i and other medical charities

Innovate UK fund work at a higher Technology Readiness Level and amongst the many Additive Manufacturing projects the more near term problems such as finishing and inspection are being addressed whereas these are almost completely absent in EPSRC projects.

Given that there is a significant level of investment from both EPSRC and Innovate UK into the Innovation space it is odd that there is so little into Adoption. It could be thought that this difference is due to the government being distracted by Brexit. However, this is really due to government philosophy (the non-interventionist policy regarding Business Support) where, for example, we have also seen the Manufacturing Advisory Service scrapped by Sajid Javid in March 2016 when he was Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.

Although a 2018 report by ATKearney for HP showed that the UK was 5th in terms of adoption of Additive Manufacturing and could be 3rd within 5 years, unless we change emphasis this placing will slip. The UK does need to invest in long term R&D to ensure the pipeline of technology but it also needs to invest relatively large sums now in the Adoption space. Without such targeted business support we risk companies failing or disappearing overseas. The result would then be that we had largely wasted our investment in Innovation.

How do we change things?

The actions needed in the UK can be largely split into short term and long term:

Short Term Actions

It would help greatly if the UK could start to implement some of the recommendations from the UK Strategy in terms of Adoption. The greatest need is probably more awareness amongst company Directors of the business benefits of Additive Manufacturing. The KTN breakfast meetings helped with this but they have just scratched the surface.

The Local Enterprise Partnerships should be funded to promote adoption of Additive Manufacturing and establish clusters/networks. There is also a need to support and enhance the UK ecosystem in the broadest senses in areas such as Health and Safety, regulations, finance etc.

Long term actions

It would help to review and update the governments Industrial Strategy and the various industry groups should be involved in this process. Hopefully this would make it more encompassing and relevant to a wider group of companies. It is also important to align other government departments such as Treasury (e.g. capital tax allowances), Department for Education – school/ technical apprentices/ university/ retraining, and Department for International Trade etc. so that they are aligned to synergistically support.

There needs to be a more joined up approach to EPSRC/ Innovate UK exploitation. The formation of UKRI (UK Research and Innovation) could help with this as both bodies now come under the same umbrella. However, it needs a fundamental rethink of how IP is generated during research and how this can be captured and nurtured through a series of EPSRC and then Innovate UK projects. This might mean a reintroduction of regular reviews and monitoring of EPSRC projects and a change of the way academics are motivated and rewarded within the university career structure.

UKRI now has the means and the authority to get this right. It needs to bring a more joined up approach to manufacturing research and innovation, to deliver an effective pipeline for the commercialisation of great ideas, making things stick in the UK for long term value capture, rather than allowing overseas interests to continue to harvest our IP and then realise most of the economic benefit outside of the UK.