are holes around just the way nature
intended
is this the optimal use of material out
there or is it because all of our nuts
bolts and screws end up being round I
need to fit in a circle actually I
contend that it’s because mainly this is
how we’ve been making circles and holes
for the past hundred or so years we’ve
used to have traditionally a subtractive
processes where we start with a block of
material and remove away what we don’t
want this has actually caused
considerable limitations to what we can
design and ultimately manufacture but
atom manufacturing is changing all of
that nowadays we can use lasers and high
energy sources to melt powder as you can
see here in this video where we are
literally depositing a material a metal
in this case layer by layer to create
intricate 3d objects and shapes in fact
what you were seeing there was actually
this part being made so yes we can still
make circles holes and those sorts of
things but one of the cool things that
we couldn’t make with any of our current
technology that now we can do with
additive manufacturing is actually
change materials as we were going and
printing that this allows us to do all
sorts of cool things in terms of
functionally grading the material we
want good corrosion resistance here
fatigue resistance there we’re resistant
we can now integrate that design and
integrate that all in a single component
so you may have heard of at a
manufacturing before under another name
3d printing that technology itself has
been around for over 30 years and the
name comes from the idea of 3d printing
layer by layer by layer you’re adding
material versus subtracting it away
initially this started out with plastic
and polymer systems in the mid 80s but
now as I said in really in the last five
to ten years this is taken off with
metals and additive manufacturing call
it additive because we are manufacturing
final goods and products as I’ll see and
talked about there of course some
challenges this disruption is both good
and bad in that regard and you can see
from this image depending on how you’re
trying to make that circular hole that
you can have something called
stair-stepping or depending on your
layer thicknesses so early systems the
layers were fairly thick and so your
circle wasn’t nice and round it would
actually stair stuff but nowadays with
metals we’re printing layers smaller
than your human hair building it up
layer by layer on by layer so that’s not
an issue although we can still run into
problems at the top there gravity can’t
fight that or we’re not changing that
can actually cause our material to sink
or sag in there and so while we have
this great design and material freedom
now we still have to be very careful
about how we think and manufacture these
parts so let me give you a couple of
examples to help illustrate this this
particular component right here is a
lightweight automotive component vincent
moran and todd palmer faculty here at
Penn State helped us design and
lightweight this Vincent was on the
formula race car team as an
undergraduate and so actually now we can
use computer algorithms to help us
determine where exactly do we want to
put material because again as we’re
adding it in there we’re not subtracting
it away we can be much more efficient
usage that allows us to lightweight
components like this which for an
automobile means better fuel economy for
a race car it means a faster car and
Penn State’s car is one of the lightest
out there and therefore one of the
fastest but as you can see there are
still some holes and shapes and geometry
the wheel has to you know the axle of
the wheel has to fit through this has to
connect to the structure on the frame
itself so it has to bolt on there
challenge those you’re printing this
particular one this is what you actually
have to make so the gray in this image
is actually the part itself but the red
and the yellow are support structures
that are there helping to fight gravity
and at the same time making sure that
your part doesn’t work warp or curl up
you can think about this as your heating
and cooling heating and cooling this
metal things want to curl up like a
potato chip and so you have to be very
careful how you were manufacturing this
and in the plastics polymer world we
figure this out we actually have
dissolvable support so then when that’s
all said and done you can dissolve it
away but this particular part was made
out of titanium and now as you can see
in this image the actual part itself has
all of these rigid support structures on
there and so we fabricated this
lightweight light emotive component with
this new space-age advanced technology I
did the manufacturing and then as Corey
Dickman one of our engineers said you go
caveman on it and literally throw it in
a vise pack cut grind and remove away
all of these support structures to get
rid of them not a very precise way of
trying to finish off components that you
might put on your car but if you know
what you’re doing you can create some
very
intricate and elaborate structures many
people say that complexity is free
because the computer doesn’t care
whether you’re printing an intricate
lattice structure like you see in this
image or whether you’re printing a solid
structure or you’re integrating those
two together so we’ve used this
technique as well two lightweight
components this particular one right
here that lattice or cellular structure
goes all the way through this and it
actually helps us lightweight this
component originally it was about ten
pounds now it only weighs about six
because of that we have more efficient
material usage which allows us to then
think about different materials for this
process the other cool thing about this
which you can’t see is that there’s
actually internal passages that snake
through this as I said this is for oil
and gas so this goes down hole to pump
fluid up or down as it spins around you
can’t make those sort of channels any
other way right now with traditional
manufacturing processes so again another
disruption if you take that lattice
structure and shrink it down and you can
get cool components like this may look
like a bowling ball to some of you but
that’s actually a hip implant
we were fortunate about four or five
years ago to meet Robert Cohen and his
team at pipeline orthopedic they had the
first fda-approved 3d printed titanium
hip implant and unfortunately don’t have
this one with me here today because it’s
probably in somebody’s hip right now but
they have now been doing this for
several years and the cool thing again
with additive manufacturing is we’re
creating this cellular structure that
mimics bone and so what this allows us
to do now is that your blood vessels and
things can grow back into it and it
integrates faster quicker so you recover
a quicker and you get out of the
hospital faster great opportunities
there you see a lot of smaller
components here but what about bigger
things well certainly there are bigger
3d printers out there as well and I love
this one was in our particular lab this
is from sy aqui makes parts that are
about 3 feet by 2 feet by 2 feet and I
think man that’s a pretty big part but I
never thought about how big is the
Machine you need to make that part and I
was so excited on the day that it came
in as you can see here you can actually
stand inside the system it actually had
to take the windows off of the building
to be able to get this thing in there
and this is the ones parts I’ve showed
you before all made with the powder
metal this actually is feeding in a wire
and instead of a laser you’re using an
electron beam there to bombard with a la
Tron’s and heated up and melted or you
can think of it as robotic welding on
steroids as I said this one in
particular is about three feet by three
two feet by two feet
sake is based up in Chicago in the big
system they’re eight feet by eight feet
by twenty feet and this is exciting a
lot of the aerospace industry because
now you can literally print wing spars
and other aerospace components that are
lighter weight much more efficient much
more cost-effective particularly when
you’re working with Titanium’s and some
of the other alloys out there they’re
very expensive to make or very expensive
and very difficult to machine now it’s
additive manufacturing it changes this
economics it disrupts them we’ve
actually built some of our own 3d
printers in our lab at the Applied
Research Lab rich Marta canit’s and his
team as you’ve seen some of the earlier
images here redesign this laser nozzle
try and take advantage of some of the
challenges they were running into in
particular as powder was feeding into
this nozzle that was overheating from
the laser that was in there and so
obviously you can’t 3d print something
if your nozzle is clogging up there so
we actually used our 3d printer to 3d
print the next part for our new machine
so some of you may have heard of
open-source the RepRap movements the 3d
printers that replicate themselves in
some ways we have this as well we have
used a 3d printer to 3d print components
for our new one and we’ve taken
advantage of additive manufacturing
capability to put internal cooling
channels here that help dissipate the
heat better powder flow better
properties and better production in our
own printers so not only are we creating
cool new parts but we’re actually using
3d printing to create better machines
and better processes to produce these
parts as well turns out that trying to
dissipate heat there’s a lot of
opportunity or a lot of need for that in
automotive aerospace construction
equipment in this particular project
work with Steve Lynch Ted royal and
david Saltzman in our lab 3d printing a
heat exchanger and so one of the cool
things that you can do with 3d printing
is you can control the surface roughness
or surface texture and so this is
actually an exact replica of a
commercial version out there except with
3d printed it and so very intricate
little lattice structures and and
cooling fins that you can see on that
turns out this guy is 15% more a fish
at removing heat dissipating heat from
your system so that means you’re gonna
get better life better fuel economy
running a better performance and your
cars your trucks aircraft as the case
may be well you’re probably asking
yourself well how do we get that better
performance
well we actually took a commercial
system put it in a large x-ray machine
that we had a CT scanner computed
tomography and much like when you go
into the doctor’s office to x-ray
yourself to see what’s going on inside
we can x-ray metal parts so you
literally put the part in the system
spin it around x-ray it and then you can
stitch all those together to create a
three-dimensional representation of your
part and now it’s added in manufacturing
you can turn around take that digital
file and print it on the machine right
there and the other in the adjacent room
should be a little scary to think about
how easy it is now to reverse engineer
components and parts it’s actually
causing a lot of disruption and a lot of
concern again to the supply chain now if
I’ve got a digital file you know where
do I make things where is it most
cost-effective to do that I’m used to
parts being shipped overseas and coming
through customs if I just email you a
file now and you print it does that gets
taxed does it have to go through customs
more importantly I can’t get a patent on
a CAD file or a digital file so what is
this doing the IP and intellectual
property do we need to move to
copywriting in those sorts of things
like we do in the song industry these
are all open questions that are out
there that a lot of folks are still
wrestling with the other challenge that
this creates is that it opens up
manufacturing to new sorts of attacks
and actually in the Department of
Homeland Security last year showed that
manufacturing infrastructure now is more
open or more susceptible to breaches and
cyber security issues than any other
type of infrastructure that we have out
there even energy water and IT systems
the IT folks know that you know people
are going to be attacking their systems
and trying to get in their data the
manufacturing engineer or machinist
sitting there looking off plans and
figuring out how to mill or lay
something isn’t necessarily concerned
with somebody hacking his data files as
the case may be but now with additive
manufacturing this is a real concern
there’s a lot of cool research going on
out there and trying to prevent this
we’ve been working with a colleague of
mine Abdullah Nasser in the lab and
Charon flank at with a company infotrac
these little components right here
little test specimens that we’ve 3d
printed
of titanium looking at those can you
tell which ones real and which ones fate
to the naked eye you can’t do that we
can actually what we do with the multi
material capabilities that we have in
the lab allow us to actually go through
and change the material and tag it with
a different different metallic component
so you don’t can’t see it or it doesn’t
cause any changes to the structure in
that but when you x-ray it or CT it as
Griffin Jones did for us in the lab you
actually can see that tag in there and
now you know it’s an authentic part or
the real thing so now with 3d printing
and additive manufacturing we can
anti-counterfeit our components that are
out there of course that are now so much
easier to reverse engineer challenge
with this though is a lot of our design
tools and optimization and analysis
tools aren’t really set up to handle the
idea of changing geometry or changing
material within a particular component
and there’s a lot of disruption that’s
going on in this field as well best
analogy are the best hope if you will
that I found so far is the minecraft
kids will sit for hours manipulating
different materials
block by block by block to create
intricate elaborate structures I want to
thank my children and their friends for
posing while they were in the midst of
building a giant sheep house why because
they could but this is the sort of
capability that we need eventually to
come to manufacturing to enable this
disruption to continue to progress it’s
cool to see that companies minecraft has
been bought out by Microsoft and
Microsoft HP and other industry Titans
have all joined forces to create new
file formats and other capabilities for
Advanta manufacturing and 3d printing so
I’m excited to see what happens there
and it’s been really interesting watch
what’s going on in the stock market with
all these companies there’s really three
big companies out there publicly traded
companies I should say that produce 3d
printing equipment stratasys x1 and 3d
systems not picking on stratasys here
you can look at all of them but if you
look at the last five years they like
many of the others have been on a roller
coaster the hype of additive
manufacturing followed by the realities
of it unfortunately or fortunately or
maybe unfortunately for them depends if
you’re working for this company and this
was followed a typical hype cycle that
we see with the introduction of a lot of
new technologies there’s
some sort of technology trigger that
comes along if you recall four or five
years ago President Obama and State of
the Union addresses what’s talking about
3d printing and additive manufacturing
America makes the National additive
manufacturing innovation Institute had
just recently been lost
stratasys bought MakerBot and eventually
as those expectations they start to
overshoot the reality of what can
actually be achieved and then at some
point and now unfortunately it looks
like the stock is sort of in the trough
of disillusionment there but I think
there’s hope and so as an engineer you
know the rest of that hype cycle if
you’re familiar with this things do get
better it just take time I think we’re
actually in the slope of enlightenment
now recently Forbes reported that job
increases job interest for 3d printing
has grown more than 2,000 percent over
the past five or six years I’m an
engineer teach engineering and I saw one
of our foundations recently reported
that more than 35 percent of all
engineering jobs require 3d printing
skills now that’s really forcing us to
think about how do we train what do we
teach and really scale up the efforts
that we’re doing so that we can move up
to this plateau of productivity because
the big companies the GES of the world
and what not Pratt Lockheed you name it
the aerospace folks and others are
investing heavily if you missed it GE a
couple months ago bought to 3d printing
companies for 1.5 billion dollars it’s a
lot of money to be throwing in around
investing this and they’re very serious
as are many others because they’re
seeing the positive aspects or the
potential of additive manufacturing I
think really where a lot of the
excitement from additive manufacturing
comes in is because it makes
manufacturing fun again and one of the
first times I heard this was from Chris
Jost who was president of Imperial
machine and tool 50 60 year old company
a family-owned company job shot machine
shop that makes small run production
components for military and high-end
customers and whatnot and so you walk in
there and it looks like any other
machine shop but if you start to go to
the back of the room you see a small
closet back there now that’s not one but
two 3d printers that are sitting in the
back you can notice the guy in the
facemask they’re not something that you
usually see in a manufacturing facility
actually if you go into some of the
other service bureaus that are out there
I was cal ram out in the LA
area go in there and it looks almost
like a clean shot or a clean room in
terms of their manufacturing facility
you actually have to be very careful
with some of this technology again some
of this disruption there’s good and bad
these small particles you got to be very
careful with handling those they can be
inhaled and some of those depending on
the composition can actually explode so
it’s actually disrupting fire code
safety codes all of those sorts of
things they don’t really know yet how to
deal with this because the technology is
fairly new versus the traditional
manufacturing machines and capabilities
that were used to dealing with but
nonetheless it’s giving rise to cool new
startups a lot of the disruption happens
from you know new startups that have
better ideas better ways of doing this
again another company out in LA
literally right amongst all of the big
space giants out there Boeing Grumman
down the street from SpaceX among others
more 3d is using they’ve got some 3d
printers there but they’re actually
bringing in engineers during lunch time
holding meetings they’re training them
in the design and development of their
new 3d printed parts and they are
actually getting ready to launch some
components into space you can really I
mean it should be easy to recognize the
importance of light weighting when
you’re trying to lift off components
rockets and spacecraft this particular
one was a lightweight truss structure
that they were able to create and then
they told me Ivan Madera the president
told me as they were testing this
actually the nozzle that traditionally
made parts broke before the truss
structure did itself so in terms of
material properties in control we’re
really there and additive is offering
lots of benefits it’s also a lot of
companies smaller companies are starting
to take advantage of the ability to
economically produce small runs of
components so this is a great story that
I’ll sort of end my talk on here with my
last example a few years ago as the
price of gold was going through the roof
people were buying up old pocket watches
taking the gold out of the cases and
throwing away the movements come along
two guys actually Penn State alum Artie
Custer and Mack Fredrick started a watch
company and they said hey we can
actually use 3d printing to go and
manufacture new watch cases and we’re
going to buy up all these movements
install them and then put a custom
banner round
and so as you could see in this video
here once you have the digital files
sending it over to the machine and
printing it out is relatively easy you
don’t need tooling fixturing all this
stuff that adds cost and manufacturing
you just print it and in this case there
you have a powder bed system you saw the
dual lasers running in there so it’s
fairly economical production and voila
you have turned something old pocket
watch movement from almost a hundred
years ago now into a beautiful
wristwatch and so now you can have these
particular components out there and sure
you know the watch case still looks like
a watch because of the components that
are inside and so all of these is again
we’re slowly seeing disruption going up
and reading or seeing some articles on
the actual components themselves being
3d printed and assembled those together
but in the meantime what we can do is
with 3d printing we can now custom order
our watches including any color you want
even if it’s black like my custom
version here that I was able to purchase
from them and so it’s very exciting time
in terms of 3d printing and additive
manufacturing time will only tell how
long circles or holes will remain
circular and in the meantime it’s very
exciting to think that design and
manufacturing now is only limited by our
imagination thank you [Applause]