Togo Tests Crucial 3D Printed Orthpaedic Procedure

African countries such as Togo are not always in a position for top-notch medical care. While this may be the case normally, they are testing a new orthapaedic procedure that will revolutionise medical implementation. By 3D scanning and then producing crucial bone structures and supports, doctors can provide care to those who may not ordinarily […]

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Naval Group and Centrale Nantes Create First 3D Printed Military Propeller Blade

3D printing is making an impact on the maritime industry, which is no small feat considering the number of regulations involved in making anything that can actually be used in the industry. So it was quite a task that a group of partners accomplished when they introduced the WAAMpeller, the world’s first class-approved 3D printed ship’s propeller, last year. The WAAMpeller was created using Wire and Arc Additive Manufacturing, or WAAM, a fast, inexpensive hybrid method of 3D printing.

The WAAMpeller now has some competition in the arena of 3D printed propeller fame. Naval Group, a French industrial group that specializes in naval defense and marine renewable energy, has partnered with fellow French institution Centrale Nantes, a school that has worked with WAAM itself in the past, to create the first full-scale 3D printed propeller blade demonstrator for military applications. The large, complex propeller blade weighs more than 300 kg and paves the way for the manufacture of more geometrically complex propellers in the future.

“Printing this demonstrator is a major step towards the manufacture of innovative propellers by additive manufacturing,” said Vincent Geiger, Director of Naval Group’s Naval Research Technology Research Center. “These initial results mean that it’s possible to envisage the short-term commissioning of differentiated propellers for the ships that will use them.”

The 3D printed propeller blade is another example of a part that could not have been made with more traditional manufacturing processes. By allowing for more innovative designs, additive manufacturing enables naval components that are more efficient, with more autonomy, better propulsion, strength and lightening.

“Additive manufacturing is a process that offers unlimited possibilities: less material used, integration of additional features and geometrically-complex parts assembly,” said Professor Jean-Yves Hascoët, who heads up the Rapid Manufacturing Platform at Centrale Nantes, in the GeM laboratory (UMR CNRS 6183). “It allows for new designs, weight savings, lower manufacturing costs.”

[Image via Centrale Nantes]

Naval Group is the European leader in naval defense, with a presence in 18 countries. The company designs, produces and supports both submarines and surface ships, and provides services for naval shipyards and bases. It also offers a wide range of marine renewable energy solutions.

Centrale Nantes was founded in 1919 and trains engineers in the scientific and technical skills they need to make an impact in the workforce. The school has a strong program in additive manufacturing, and is involved in other research into additive manufacturing and naval applications, including propellers. Its industrial capabilities and expertise in trajectory generation and additive manufacturing make it a valuable partner on this latest project.

From submarine hulls to replacement parts, 3D printing is making its presence known in the naval and marine sectors. The appeal of the technology is the same as it is in other industries such as aerospace and automotive: it’s faster, less expensive, and can create novel geometries with capabilities beyond anything that can be created using conventional manufacturing techniques. Additive manufacturing often results in much more lightweight components, which enable ships, planes and automobiles to be speedier and more efficient, saving both money and energy.

Discuss this and other 3D printing topics at 3DPrintBoard.com or share your thoughts below.

 

Mainstreaming of Additive Manufacturing: An Ecosystem Perspective

This week’s busy and informative Science in the Age of Experience event, held in Boston, highlighted the 3DEXPERIENCE of organizer Dassault Systèmes‘ partners and customers as 3D technologies make more integrated platform thinking possible. Starting off the event, co-located with the 3DEXPERIENCE Forum, was Monday’s Additive Manufacturing Symposium, which brought together experts across a variety of disciplines and focuses working with industrial 3D printing technologies.

Subham Sett, Director, Additive Manufacturing & Materials, was one of the driving forces behind the Symposium experience as he was for last year’s, and it was a pleasure to speak with him again as we sat down to discuss the merits of such gatherings as well as the direction of the industry.

“When we started planning for the event, last year we looked at everything from conceiving the product to making it. We had a vision for material, design, manufacturing, and marketplace, but we weren’t in a place to say everything is out there to see, or it wasn’t widespread. A year later, we’re there,” he told me of the coming together of this resource and the progress made in just one year in the industry.

“We can see that in the tracks; there’s a growing ecosystem, and users, with thought leaders willing to come and speak of their own experiences. We heard from Airbus and the journey they started in this direction. A nice thing from the Airbus keynote was to see everything start with design on the project [Sjoerd Van der Veen] was talking about, which was under way I want to say two years ago. At our users’ conference in 2015, Airbus challenged us to see what Dassault can do end to end… It’s been great to see not onlyt that, but to hear from Boeing too. These challenges from the biggest names in aerospace, and how we talk about going from concept to production.”

Subham Sett, far right, kept the 3D printing panel conversation going as the moderator

Given the breadth of industries putting Dassault Systèmes’ portfolio of services to use, taking ideas through to production requires a strong look at design. By incorporating 3D printing more significantly into the workflow, design for additive manufacturing (DfAM) figures more strongly into consideration, particularly when looking toward the rising need for functional parts.

“Design is the first step, looking at lightweighting, at topology optimization. For the industry to grow and become mainstream, these parts have to be in production in the field. Our focus is printable,” Sett said.

“What’s really driving this shift toward performance in additive is material. Additive is science; we’re bringing in the physics to make it functional.”

The sessions, including the breakout tracks, were designed to bring a variety of perspectives to showcase the importance of these sciences in industrial 3D printing. Sett underscored that Dassault Systèmes is focusing on developing simulation from a material perspective and a process perspective, in a material- and process-agnostic way. It is, as he calls it, any material, any machine. This approach allows users to meet their needs without needing to turn to new software packages; “All of it can be done by a very simple customization process,” Sett noted.

By leveraging experience gained across platforms such as CATIA over the last two decades-plus, the Dassault Systèmes team has been developing their additive manufacturing applications by “using the same digital thread, parametric geometry,” and having been exposed to users’ applications ranging from functional design to shape compensation. Compensating for distortion ahead of a print job allows for the part to come out right the first time, thanks to simulation.

“We are at a point in additive manufactuing where it’s still not mainstream, and there’s a lot to figure out. Technologies are changing at such a rapid pace it almost feels like the latest and greatest for technology is in the additive space. There is not enough being done yet to address how the end user approaches it, though. I feel that’s a shared responsibility for the ecosystem, whether software like us or OEMs, to come together to design programs, whether graduate or undergraduate level programs, to train more,” Sett said, pointing to the critical consideration of workforce education and training.

“With Dassault Systèmes we’ve started the journey already; you can see that in the [co-located student] hackathon, they have access to our whole software suite, working in one environment through the cloud. They can be productive, they can communicate with the machine. This is a bridge between the digital world and the real world. More needs to be done at the curriculum level, and we’re talking with several universities to add to the curriculum. A lot more needs to be done.”

Keeping on this train of thought, we touched on the need for training and certification in the industry as well. The current workforce requires more training to be ready to bring these new technologies on-site — and they need the reassurance that it will be worth it. Certification of parts for end use is a major focus in particularly the highly-regulated aerospace and medical sectors, and will have a cumulative effect of highlighting the quality and consistency with which additive manufacturing can produce parts for industry.

“Where we are seeing a lot of interest for functional parts is in aerospace and defense, but also in life sciences. Not just for customized tools, either; this is an area users and cusotmers are encouraging us to push. Life sciences are seeing more focus in materials qualification and process certification. These industries are leading the charge for usable parts. Hopefully others will follow suit,” he said.

For additive manufacturing to truly become mainstream, Sett pointed out, functional parts need to come into existence.

“Part of that picture is getting the whole supply chain on a certification track. It’s a shared responsibility to move the industry along,” he said.

[Image: Dassault Systèmes]

Part of that shared responsibility also means building up a better experience for users. One challenge many potential users are facing, and one directly impacting Dassault Systèmes, comes in the form of software. Some users have reported as many as 10 different software programs coming into play. “Engineers, designers, simulation analysts, and manufacturers are not just looking at software that looks integrated on the surface,” Sett pointed out, but require actual integration in real-world conditions.

“There’s are productivity loss issues that come with learning multiple software packages. Clearly there’s recognition of this in the additive manufacturing industry as it’s maturing. Being able to connect all this in a digital thread that takes it all the way through machines is necessary,” he said. “There’s a need for hardware and software guys to come together to complete the user experience — not just the user experience, but the whole journey… From the Dassault Systèmes side, we want to bridge that gap from concept to production so we can focus more on production.”

Ultimately, he told me, the message he’s looking to get out there is that, “We want to make additive real for the enterprise.”

An entire ecosystem is necessary for industrial 3D printing to truly take its place as part of the mainstream manufacturing industry, with all aspects connecting much more seamlessly than they are now.

Discuss Dassault Systèmes, industry challenges, and other 3D printing topics at 3DPrintBoard.com or share your thoughts in the Facebook comments below.

[All photos: Sarah Goehrke]

 

Dutch Manufacturer VormVrij Unveils LUTUM v4 Clay Printer Series

Netherlands-based VormVrij has just revealed their plans for releasing their new LUTUM v4 series of printers. This successor series to the v3 is a metal-bodied product line that uses all forms of Clay as the print material. The new series specialises in pottery, with the ability to print clay figurines, pots and items from 50-80 […]

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Naval Group and Centrale Nantes print full-scale propeller blade for military applications

Naval Group, a French industrial group focusing on naval defence and marine renewable energy, and Centrale Nantes engineering school have successfully 3D printed their first full-scale propeller blade demonstrator using the Wire Arc Additive Manufacturing (WAAM) process. This large, geometrically complex blade weighing over 300kg was produced under the framework of the Joint Laboratory of Marine technology, […]

VormVrij LUTUM 4 clay 3D printer technical specifications and pricing

Dutch clay 3D printer manufacturer VormVrij has released the LUTUM 4 series of 3D printers. Fourth generation machines, LUTUM 4s comes with a number of upgrades and under-the-hood improvements, including an ability to 3D print pottery up to 80 cm tall. Speed test on a LUTUM V4 3D printer. Clip via Yao van den Heerik on YouTube […]

3D Scanning, 3D Printing, and the Business of Publishing Shoes

A volunteer prepares to demonstrate the 3D scanning process for FitStation at the HP Global Innovation Summit

In today’s virtual world, stepping outside to take a breather and immerse oneself in nature is often a much-needed break from computers and the fluorescent lights of an office. That sort of immersion is enhanced for many people by taking a walk — and, increasingly, doing so while wearing footwear created with advanced technologies including immersive computing.

During the HP Global Innovation Summit earlier this month in Barcelona, after having heard more from HP and its partners working with the FitStation platform announced last summer, I appreciated the opportunity to sit down with Josh St. John, Head of Product, Immersive Computing at HP, and Eric Hayes, Chief Marketing Officer, Superfeet to hear more about progress in personalized footwear.

“We’ve seen progress made on 3D printing for lasts and molds,” Hayes told me, touching as well on the Flowbuilt facility announced shortly before our conversation. “That’s the catcher of the information that turns information from digital to physical. We have Multi Jet Fusion there and more; the intent of Flowbuilt is to make the products that FitStation uses. We use MJF for 3D printing of lasts, there’s the ability to adapt the shape of the shoe or insole to your foot.

“The magic of FitStation, where all the effort from Josh’s team and all comes in, is to take that data and make it into something that’s actually good for your body. If you take that static image and create a thing from it, it’s not helping your body; we wash it, we craft it into the shape your body needs to best benefit from it. Then we build a last and build a shoe around its shape for your body. The reason the wood-carved lasts went by the wayside is that they were expensive, they were used once and put by the wayside. There are a lof of people now; we can’t all have our own wood lasts in the back. With MJF, we print not only the lasts, but the unique parts. We print individual areas, apply that to traditional lasts, and can build the shoe around that.”

Hayes (left) and St. John

The FitStation work includes collaboration with DESMA, which Hayes noted requires molds made to go on their particular machines. As with effectively any mold, there are traditionally long lead times and high costs involved in creating molds via specialized mold makers. 3D printing allows for increasingly well-understood benefits in streamlining this process, reducing costs and times.

“MJF moves an $8,000 mold to maybe a $1,500 one. For the future, there’s potential use in development and then production. Compare that with a mold made from aluminum,” Hayes said. “With molding able to move from development to production, there’s potential for profit for outside shoe sizes for a company, for smaller brands that can expand to in-between sizes.”

The pain of having a nonstandard shoe size frequently extends beyond shoe store frustration, as finding a good fit often translates to a good-enough fit — which for those spending significant time on their feet is often not good enough at all. Line and service workers, hikers, runners, or anyone else relying on pedestrian mobility face a tough issue in seeking out the perfect shoes and insoles to keep them as comfortable as possible.

Shoes, St. John affirmed, should be optimized for fit.

“FitStation lets us quantify that, lets us create instructions for manufacturing. Brooks is developing a shoe, produced across the FitStation platform, that all comes down to optimizing the manufacturing infrastructure for it,” he said, touching on the personalized Genesys shoe that Brooks unveiled at the summit.

The partners involved in FitStation create a recommendation process to determine the best route to best fit. This process, Hayes added, offers a helpful approach for customers.

“The onus is entirely on the consumer right now to find what fits for them,” he told me. “FitStation takes that over, cuts the wheat from the chaff if you will, and provides a service, which is very important for the consumer. Designs are curated for the consumer. Curation and customization is the next step up.”

Operating at 29 retail pilot sites as of the time of our chat, St. John pointed to the offerings of FitStation when it comes to 3D scanning feet. Incorporating MJF 3D printing into the end-to-end FitStation platform, HP sees “an opportunity to scale the 3D printed insole business,” he said, as 3D printing custom insoles and orthotics enables a better, more personal fit.

This advanced solution in a platform approach enables not only a better ultimate fit and experience for the consumer, but a new way of thinking for footwear providers.

“Superfeet is 41 years old; we’ve launched a lot of products over the years,” Hayes said. “The ME3D product coming off Multi Jet Fusion has been the most successful product launch in Superfeet history; it has the lowest return rate, the highest rating, and the highest repeat purchase rate. The average Superfeet consumer owns three insoles, which tend to be disparate, think for casual, formal, and hiking shoes. Once they find ME3D, they want more ME3D, which is fantastic. The product itself just performs so much better, because we’re making it specific not just to you, but to your right foot and your left foot. Being able to customize this pair and tailor one for your left foot and one for your right foot, the overall satisfaction rating goes through the roof.”

Very few people are actually symmetrical, and it’s these small variations that give us personality — and can make finding the right fit additionally challenging. This is where 3D printing fits especially well, as the technology is seeing increasing use among a growing amount of businesses involved in the footwear sector.

“With all the applications we’re aware of, in dental, in jewelry, this is the application I’ve seen that’s ripest for it,” St. John said of footwear.

The coming together of footwear and 3D printing is attracting notice worldwide. Advances in the technological capabilities of additive manufacturing are seeing it situated as a strong contender for footwear applications, as materials are strong enough now to support weight in end-use products alongside the use of the technology to create lasts and molds for more traditional fabrication. Integration with advanced platforms incorporating 3D scanning and software support also make more possible.

“It’s not that we’ve been ignoring 3D printing for the last 25 years, it’s that 3D printing wasn’t ready yet to put the Superfeet name on it,” Hayes said of the company’s relationship with the technology.

“The data coming off Fitstation wasn’t there. MJF made it not just economical, but viable performance-wise for us to put our name on it. We’re very confident because of MJF and what the performance can do. Anyone can take a scan of a foot; it’s what you do with that data that matters. FitStation lets us manufacture off that data, and lets us do it at scale, turn it around, and deliver to the customer.”

Scale production and enabling new economies of manufacturing are among the key issues HP has sought to address with its Multi Jet Fusion 3D printing technology. That realizable benefits of these efforts are being acknowledged and put to use in real-world production is a strong statement to the viability of HP’s ambitious disruptive vision for industrial 3D manufacturing.

The 3D printed heelcap of a Superfeet insole

These visions are being brought to fruition not by MJF alone, of course, but through the integration of complementary technologies, including immersive computing.

“With immersive solutions, either the customer knows exactly what they want to do, like 3D scanning, or they have a problem they need to solve,” St. John told me. “With Superfeet and DESMA, two partners with great expertise and market reach, we bring in 3D printing, manufacturing, IT infrastructure, and distribution. Together, that relationship is able to be really strong, to reinvent manufacturing.”

Comparing use of MJF versus traditionallly made custom insoles, Hayes pointed to benefits such as adjusting flexibility and more design possibilities, “more custom tweaks.”

“This is digital craftsmanship, it’s digitization of craft,” St. John said. “It’s a way to publish shoes.”

Discuss HP, Multi Jet Fusion, the future of manufacturing, and other 3D printing topics at 3DPrintBoard.com or share your thoughts in the Facebook comments below.

[All photos: Sarah Goehrke]

 

New Research Could Lead to DNA 3D Printer

Technology is capable of amazing things, but it doesn’t mean those things are easy. It’s incredible that scientists can produce DNA in a lab, but the process is difficult, lengthy and requires toxic chemicals. Imagine, however, if they could simply print it, the way that you would 3D print anything else. That could be the future, after scientists at UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory developed a new way to synthesize DNA. The method could lead to DNA printers, similar to ordinary 3D printers, that could produce DNA strands that are more accurate and 10 times longer than the strands produced with today’s methods – more quickly and easily, and without the use of toxic chemicals.

“If you’re a mechanical engineer, it’s really nice to have a 3D printer in your shop that can print out a part overnight so you can test it the next morning,” said UC Berkeley graduate student Dan Arlow. “If you’re a researcher or bioengineer and you have an instrument that streamlines DNA synthesis, a ‘DNA printer,’ you can test your ideas faster and try out more new ideas. I think it will lead to a lot of innovation.”

The research was led by Arlow and PhD student Sebastian Palluk, a doctoral student at the Technische Universität Darmstadt in Germany and a visiting student at Berkeley Lab. It is published in a paper entitled “De novo DNA synthesis using polymerase-nucleotide conjugates,” which you can access here. The research was conducted at the Department of Energy’s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI).

“I personally think Dan and Sebastian’s new method could revolutionize how we make DNA,” said Jay Keasling, a UC Berkeley professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, senior faculty scientist at Berkeley Lab and Chief Executive Officer of JBEI.

Keasling and JBEI scientists specialize specialize in adding genes to microbes, typically yeast and bacteria, to sustainably produce useful products. Palluk came from Germany specifically to work with Arlow in Keasling’s lab.

L to R: Dan Arlow, Sebastian Palluk and Jay Keasling

“We believe that increased access to DNA constructs will speed up the development of new cures for diseases and simplify the production of new medicines,” Palluk said.

The synthesis of DNA is a growing business; companies are ordering custom-made genes so that they can produce chemicals, biologic drugs or industrial enzymes. Researchers purchase synthetic genes to engineer plants and animals or try out new CRISPR-based disease therapies. Some scientists have even researched storing information in DNA, but that would require much larger quantities of DNA than are currently synthesized. All of these applications require that synthesis produce the desired sequence of nucleotides or bases, the building blocks of DNA, in each of millions or billions of copies of DNA molecules.

Current DNA synthesis is limited to producing oligonucleotides about 200 bases long, because errors in the process lead to a low yield of correct sequences as the length increases. To assemble even a small gene, scientists have to stitch together segments of about 200 bases long. The turnaround time for a small gene of 1,500 bases long can be two weeks at a cost of $300, limiting the experiments that scientists can do. Synthetic biologists like Arlow, Palluk and Keasling often insert a dozen different genes at once into a microbe to get it to produce a chemical, and each gene presents its own synthesis problems.

“As a student in Germany, I was part of an international synthetic biology competition, iGEM, where we tried to get E. coli bacteria to degrade plastic waste,” said Palluk. “But I soon realized that most of the research time was spent just getting all the DNA together, not doing the experiments to see if the engineered cells could break down the plastic. This really motivated me to look into the DNA synthesis process.”

The technology developed by Palluk, Arlow, Keasling and their team relies on a DNA-synthesizing enzyme found in cells of the immune system that has the natural ability to add nucleotides to an existing DNA molecule in water, where DNA is most stable. The technology results in increased precision, allowing synthesis of DNA strands several thousand bases long – a medium-sized gene.

“We have come up with a novel way to synthesize DNA that harnesses the machinery that nature itself uses to make DNA,” Palluk said. “This approach is promising because enzymes have evolved for millions of years to perform this exact chemistry.”

Cells create DNA by copying it with the help of several different polymerase enzymes that build on DNA already in the cell. But in the 1960s, scientists discovered a polymerase that doesn’t rely on an existing DNA template but instead randomly adds nucleotides to genes that make antibodies for the immune system. The enzyme, called terminal deoxynucleotidyl transferase (TdT), creates random variation in these genes, resulting in antibody proteins that are better able to attack new types of invaders.

TdT is fast and does not have side-reactions that could affect the resulting molecule. Scientists over the years have tried to use the enzyme to synthesize DNA sequences, but it was hard to control. The key is to find a way to get the enzyme to add one nucleotide and then stop, so that the sequence can be synthesized one base at a time. Previous approaches tried to obtain that control by using modified nucleotides with a special blocking group that prevents multiple additions at once. After the DNA molecules have been extended by a blocked nucleotide, the blocking groups are removed to allow the next addition.

TdT, however, cannot accommodate a blocking group on the nucleotide being added. But Arlow came up with the idea to tether an unblocked nucleotide to TdT, so that after the nucleotide is added, the enzyme remains attached and prevents further additions. After the molecule has been extended, the tether is cut, releasing the enzyme and re-exposing the end for the next addition.

In the first trials, the researchers demonstrated that this technique is not only faster and simpler, but nearly as accurate as other techniques in each step of the synthesis.

“When we analyzed the products using NGS, we were able to determine that about 80 percent of the molecules had the desired 10-base sequence,” Arlow said. “That means, on average, the yield of each step was around 98 percent, which is not too bad for a first go at this 50-plus-year-old problem. We want to get to 99.9 percent in order to make gene-length DNA.”

Once they can reach 99.9 percent fidelity, they can synthesize a 1,000-base-long molecule with a yield of more than 35 percent, which is currently impossible with existing techniques.

“By directly synthesizing longer DNA molecules, the need to stitch oligonucleotides together and the limitations arising from this tedious process could be reduced,” said Palluk. “Our dream is to directly synthesize gene-length sequences and get them to researchers within few days.”

“Our hope is that the technology will make it easier for bioengineers to more quickly figure out how to biomanufacture useful products, which could lead to more sustainable processes for producing the things that we all depend on in the world, including clothing, fuel and food, in a way that requires less petroleum,” said Arlow.

He added, “Our dream is to make a gene overnight. For companies trying to sustainably biomanufacture useful products, new pharmaceuticals, or tools for more environmentally friendly agriculture, and for JBEI and DOE, where we’re trying to produce fuels and chemicals from biomass, DNA synthesis is a key step. If you speed that up, it could drastically accelerate the whole process of discovery.”

Discuss this and other 3D printing topics at 3DPrintBoard.com or share your thoughts below. 

[Source: UC Berkeley / Images: Marilyn Chung, Berkeley Lab]

 

Chanel’s 3D Printed Watch Features Movements Without Spokes

The high-end fashion world has few names quite as dominant as chanel, so it’s a big deal when they begin to adopt 3D printing. Their novel new watch design Boy-Friend Skeleton features all the high class flourishes one might expect. However, when one digs deeper into its mechanics they might find something incredible. Chanel’s 3D printed […]

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