Transcript

Disrupting Manufacturing One Layer At A Time | Tim Simpson | TEDxPSU

let's begin with a simple question why 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]