Production Ready – Desktop Metal prepares to release its production system

A year ago, before RAPID+TCT 2017, I was heading to a company that everyone in the additive manufacturing (AM) world might be talking about, but few knew many of the details. The name alone got people talking “Desktop Metal? Metal 3D printing on your desktop? Surely not”.

They did not know Metal desk was home to some of the greatest minds in the industry and was preparing to launch its first product, The Studio System – a desktop-friendly metal 3D printing system. Aiming to change the paradigms of metal 3D printing, Desktop Metal launched the $120,000 ecosystem that took users from design to print to post-processing and is capable of manufacturing in a multitude of previously unprintable metals.

Many companies in this industry and the tech world have spoken of a good game in their quest for world domination, few if any have rolled out the strategy as quickly as Desktop Metal. In a conversation, CEO Ric Fulop explains how, in the twelve months since my visit, the Burlington, Massachusetts-based company has dramatically scaled up its operations:

“We are almost two and a half times bigger than a year ago; we now have 226 full-time employees, including 200 engineers. we have over 100 business partners and resellers with distribution in over 40 countries. We had approximately $100 million in funding last time we spoke, and today we have $277 million, the latest is a $65 million investment led by Ford Motor Company with their CTO joining our board.”

The statistics kept coming in; Desktop Metal began shipping the Studio System to its first Pioneer, Google ATAP program in December 2017, with expanded shipping in 2018; the system has obtained two patents for the interface layer and the separable support strategies, with more than 100 patents pending covering more than 200 inventions; he expanded the HQ from 40,000 square feet to 60,000; and received numerous accolades, including the Rising Star Award at the inaugural TCT Awards.

Right to build

The stats are good but as Ric tells me, Desktop Metal’s main job is to “make customers successful”. This can only be achieved by delivering on promises of price, materials, ease of use and speed. For Built-Rite Tool & Die, one of its Studio System pioneers, those boxes were checked.

Built-Rite, the mold design and manufacturing company specializing in precision mold manufacturing, was originally contracted to manufacture a Studio System plastic part used to eject media cartridges. After experiencing first-hand the faster lead times and lower costs for rapid rotation mold services available with the Studio system, Built-Rite soon realized that a metal 3D printing solution to this kind of award could transform the company’s prototyping and give it an edge. on foreign manufacturers who are constantly driving down prices.

Built-Rite put the Studio System’s bonded metal deposition technology to the test by identifying and replicating an existing mold insert previously fabricated using CNC machining. The mold was printed, debonded and sintered using the Desktop Metal Studio system. It was then finished using in-house grinding and EDM equipment to achieve the tolerances and surface finish required of injection molding.

Compared to a third-party high-speed machine shop, the part 3D printed with Studio Systems was 41% lighter, 30% faster to manufacture, and an astonishing 90% less expensive.

live and kick

With the launch and delivery of the Studio System in 2017, the start of 2018 saw Desktop Metal turn its sights to software preview. From the recently formed DM Labs R&D project, Live Parts was unveiled in February. Ric Fulop is incredibly excited about the generative design tool created by senior software engineer Andy Roberts: “Andy is a pioneer in parametric modeling, he was VP at PTC and designed many features in Pro/Engineer. about this concept of applying cell growth principles to generative design for some time.”

While many other generative design tools take load cases from static inputs, Live Parts tackles transition forces between multiple load cases and examines part assemblies in the context of multiphysics. On-screen demonstrations of Live Parts show components growing in what almost seems like a time-lapse of plant life.

“There’s a void in 3D printing tools that improve productivity,” Fulop suggests. “One of the many exciting things about Live Parts is that it works for all 3D prints, whether you’re printing in plastic or metal, any system can take advantage of Live Parts, and as part of the growth of the industry, we would like to expose this tool to all.”.

Set up a production

Desktop Metal used RAPID+ TCT 2017 to launch the company into the world and the focus was on its Studio System’s ability to revolutionize metal prototyping. This year, the company focused on the holy grail of metal 3D printing, production.

“The production system is a much more complex and sophisticated system,” says Fulop. “It’s almost five meters long and, in terms of output, is equivalent to having 100 mid-range powder bed fusion machines. It’s super fast, it produces very high resolution parts at a considerably lower cost. to that of powder bed fusion.

The analysis of production system cost savings is tied to the early decision to separate printing from heat treatment. The separation allows Desktop Metal to take advantage of the much more mature market for metal injection molding (MIM) materials. MIM materials, thanks to their abundance, are up to 80% cheaper than metal powders explicitly designed for 3D printing. The separation also means that Desktop Metal can use a multitude of alloys that are fundamentally unprintable with powder bed fusion type welding technology.

The production system printing process is called Single Pass Jetting (SPJ) and its roots go deep into the history of 3D printing. Professor Emanuel (Ely) Sachs is co-founder of Desktop Metal and a crucial contributor to the SPJ project. While at MIT in the late 80s, he created a core technology that permeates much of today’s 3D printing in binder jetting. According to Ely, the choice to use inkjet heads to project a binder onto powder 30 years ago is only now beginning to realize its true potential.

“We went with binder jetting because it offered great flexibility in what materials you could build with,” Sachs remarks. “I wanted to move away from polymers and use ceramics and metals for functional parts and tooling, but the real clincher for me was that I saw a path to creating technology that could make The fact that you have a fundamental interest in metal 3D printing and the huge advancements in inkjet printing, which is now used to print books on demand, means that we are seeing a resurgence of binder jetting.”

These factors combined with the growth of the MIM industry meant there was a clear path for SPJ to be at the heart of a truly innovative development in metal 3D printing, recognized as such by MIT Technology Review, Popular Science and the prestigious Edison Awards. .

“The main innovation of Single Pass Jetting is captured in the name,” says Sachs. “If you look at binder jetting implementations until very recently they scan a printhead over a bed of powder, while that’s pretty fast, it can still take 10 seconds to print each layer, plus you have to add time to spread the First off, SPJ has dramatically increased the speed at which we can spread powder and we print in one pass in both directions so rates can be as high as the technology can endure, and there is no wasted time retracting the printhead.”

For a long time, 3D printing promised the democratization of manufacturing by giving small businesses the ability to iterate and get products to market faster. While this has happened to some extent in the world of plastics, the production system may be on the verge of doing so for metal fabrication.