Additive Manufacturing in Canada

welcome everybody as people start to join us here in the room my name is sean casemore i'll be your host for today's event so as normal it's top of the hour we've opened up the room and people are piling in watch your step uh what we're gonna do is get started here in just probably one to two minutes i'd like to give everybody enough time to get in get settled so uh just stay tuned here as we uh pile into the room maybe actually it shouldn't be crowded you should have lots of space um but yeah just stay tuned we're gonna get started in about a minute or so here just give everybody time to jump in so hold tight and i'm just testing the audio here sean you can hear me okay okay do you want me to share my screen at this stage or not sure sure so again for those of you just joining us here we've got quite a few signed up for today's event so we're just going to give it another minute here make sure everybody gets a chance to see this from the start so just uh stay stay tuned you probably have enough time to run for a really quick coffee if you want to so we're just going to give it one more minute here before we get to get started and jump into today so just bear with us that looks good mark so you're good to go there we'll just give another minute here just a quick technical question sean on zoom unlike teams will it automatically share the audio uh in the powerpoint do you think uh that is a very good question i think it will pretty quick yeah we'll know pretty quick all right so everybody uh joining us here today i think we've got uh just so you just so you know just so so you're aware of of the impact these events are having uh for manufacturers across canada and technology companies obviously we had over 100 people signed up for today's event now if you've attended any events what you may learn is that you never get everybody here that you that had signed up but as you also know we share the recording these events out with you so that you can watch them for 30 days i think that's the time limit that zoom gives us and then we transfer that over to the engine youtube channel um so we'll we'll make sure if you couldn't make this event today you've always got this in your hands but clearly this is a topic that is the timing is right for all of our members across canada so my name is sean casemar i want to welcome you officially to today's event if you haven't seen or heard from me then you've probably never been to these events i'm uh i guess i call myself your host uh and i'm joined by a partner in crime frank defalco he's our director of membership for engine and he's sitting in the background supporting us as well before i jump into introducing today's guest in today's topic you'll see in front of you as we normally do with these events we realize that the q a doesn't always provide sufficient time for you to ask questions for you to share ideas and share best practices things that you're doing so as with these events we normally have a round table the following thursday we used to have them at 10 a.m we moved them to 11 to try and line up the times for everybody so if you found you know interest from today's conversation uh whether you're watching this after the fact or you're here live with us and you'd like to attend a brief round table there's no more than an hour to share ideas and learn more best practices mark is also going to be joining us there he's today's speaker we hope you will join us it will be next thursday march 4th at 11 a.m eastern standard time you will see an email coming from me i will share with you the slides from today as well as remind you to if you'd like to attend to let me know and then i'll send the link out to you okay so stay tuned for that you'll see an email from me with more information and again the whole point of that roundtable is to continue the dialogue that we'll be having here today so before i turn it over to our speaker i would be remiss of not giving a brief introduction but i'll give a brief introduction actually of today's presentation because it's a little bit different this is ultimately today's presentation that mark kirby is going to walk us through it's an overview of the additive manufacturing ecosystem in canada from an industry research and training perspective uh it covers both technology developments application highlights and regulatory differences and lessons learned from a hands-on industry engagement so mark will share more about where did that engagement come from ultimately but ngem was involved and hence this is information we think you're going to find very timely now let me introduce our speaker today mark kirby after graduating mit in aero in astro engineering mark joined rolls-royce in the uk working on air-breathing rocket engines as he describes him before moving to his father's machine shop jet blades mark worked from all his way up from cad programmer to managing director making parts for formula one teams and rolls-royce jet engines in 2007 he immigrated to the maritimes in canada with his family and he provides provided hands-on coaching for companies introducing advanced lights out manufacturing he joined renishaw in 2013 to head their canadian additive manufacturing business and start up their first north american solution center and then in 2020 mark moved to the university of waterloo to lead industry training for additive manufacturing so there is nobody better positioned to speak not only about the results of this survey but about additive manufacturing in canada than mark kirby so with that said mark if you can hear me i'm going to turn it over to you and mute myself great well uh thanks for that uh sean i like the way you led into that nobody better positioned well let's take this position up shall we here we have uh we're on board the space shuttle obviously i'm a rocket scientist by training uh and canada is in the background there and the canadarm in the foreground uh lots of exciting developments recently with perseverance landing on mars and you know hopefully it's a it's a bright future technology is going to be our friend um so i'm going to try and take it around canada um so please keep your hands and feet inside the ride at all times and uh hang on hopefully this will be fun so uh why is added this is the most boring bit of the presentation by the way um why is additive manufacturing important well according to wallers maybe it's 6.8 billion dollars worth of parts being manufactured that's parts not not machines that's parts and it's growing at a pretty regular 20 so it's a growth industry however global manufacturing added value is 14 trillion dollars so it's easy to dismiss additive as well you know it's really not that important however the projection is that it will represent one percent of all manufacturing in future and that would be worth about two billion dollars to canada's gdp and in terms of our crystal ball um you know i think one of the messages i'd like you to take away is disruption who have you had global pandemic is going to have us all working from home for the next uh 18 months in your corporate strategic plan i don't think anybody did um so we don't really know exactly how it's going to be disruptive and by definition disruption happens where you least expect it so i just ask if you look look at this through the lens of not why it doesn't apply to you but how could it apply to you try to look at it through a positive lens i think it's it's easy to look at it through a negative lens okay so um we've we did a survey uh across canada uh and here's there's a link to this uh to our results and we covered everything from plastic printing that's the kind of thing that maybe you've got in your basement at home or your kids have got um all the way through to this is really what additive manufacturing looks like in canada that's a massive die casting tool with conformally cooled inserts produced by exco who are one of the leading companies you know i'm going to pick them up but i'm going to say in the world on this so if we look across canada very roughly there are about a thousand polymer machines excluding hobbyist machines the ones in your basement and they're the order of a hundred metal machines of all descriptions whether it's laser powder bed ded electron beam binder jet so that we literally we've got additive manufacturing from coast to coast most of the installations in quebec and ontario but i'm going to take you coast to coast today he hopes okay there we go so the we formed an advisory board with about 30 members from across canada from all different sectors uh and really this represents literally hundreds of years of experience i was gonna gonna make it thousands but i don't think everybody's got 30 years experience in it but it's literally hundreds of years of experience and many of the people who are part of engines additive manufacturing advisory board really are all in um you know they're they're betting everything on this so they're highly committed they're highly passionate and as you can imagine not everybody has the same point of view so the survey has some interesting reading uh here are here are some snippets from it for you i'm not going to read them out uh there's many more sound bites inside the uh inside the white paper that we've done and here are just a few of them so hopefully you can read quickly okay so one of the one of the interesting things on technology adoption is you know what why why'd you go out and spend money and uh i had to be honest i had expected the answer here to be a lot more on the left-hand side that it was you know i went and invested in the equipment when i had the order in my hand somewhat surprisingly um we can see that in canada we we we maybe uh we're a bit more risk-taking so the the big orange bar is most people bought this to expand into a new market it was a speculative investment as opposed to it was it was a done deal and i think that was that was a little bit of a surprise um but again you know i think we're being we're being pioneers and hopefully one of the things you'll take away from today's trip around canada is that um you know we're a big country geographically we're small in terms of population and and maybe market size but we we always seem to punch above our weight this is a very complicated complicated uh swot analysis where we tried to ask people what do they think of the strengths uh of the canadian landscape and what are the what are the weaknesses all the threats the black line um starting from sort of positive on the left and negative on the right so uh unsurprisingly customers are seen as a real positive as is innovation and competitors on the far right has seen as uh as a bit of a negative a little bit a little bit hard because everybody has a different viewpoint on strengths and strengths and weaknesses and again hopefully today you'll be able to form your own opinion of what you think the strengths and weaknesses of the am landscape is across canada so let's you know we talked about disruption we're all being disrupted by the current pandemic um 3d printing certainly um has been a technology that has that has helped we've all tried to help um i'm gonna have to miss out today more than i can include uh when i said there are you know a thousand plastic institutions and a hundred metal ones then you can see that i'm going to miss out a lot more i'm trying to show some of the things maybe you haven't seen but here are some examples we've got exege and renishaw and starfish all working uh on how do we use 3d printing to help uh alleviate the crisis whether it's making ventilators whether it's making ppe and of course ngen has supported a lot of work with vaccine development so um i'm going to take a dive into uh one of the companies so i said i'd take it around canada today and uh hopefully this is going to play okay our movies are not going to play that's a bit of a blow okay let me just see if i can do much let me just see if i can get this to get this to play here maybe it will play if it doesn't we can include the link in the follow-up email okay well um that i'm just gonna drop i'm just going to drop out of this and see if we can get it to play out of screen sharing let's just see if we can get it to play the kind of uh old-fashioned way here okay well fortunately i haven't got too many videos today so that was going to take us to precision adm who are producing the nasal swab among other things and this has now become the world's uh highest volume uh printed medical device that that's quite an accolade for canada um and there were some very good reasons why 3d printing was the right solution including some late changes to exactly how these the the geometry of these swabs and again 3d printing is great to accommodate that versus say injection molding uh where making changes to tooling is not fast um so 3d printing has certainly proven itself and there was a very interesting interview i did with martin patrick's ceo um i think he was he was surprisingly he's always candid and he admitted even he wasn't sure that 3d printing could really scale to millions of devices like it has done so that's a tremendous success story for for canada um now i'm gonna take you all the way to the uh so we started in the middle of canada there in manitoba we're gonna go all the way to prince edward island now to a company called transjet uh tronos jet was uh founded in 2001 it's a relatively small company about 30 people um they're an aircraft lesser and trader their speciality is the british aerospace 146 or avro rj and they have traded sold and delivered about 60 of these aircraft across the world and in 2004 they uh formed a heavy maintenance organization uh let me just get my notes to be correct here they are actually um it is a faa eosa transport canada approved maintenance organization doing heavy maintenance on these aircraft and they subsequently embarked on the design modifications to modify the aircraft to be a 3 000 gallon water bomber and they achieved an faa supplemental type certificate for this so this is as you can imagine this is not a trivial exercise in terms of regulations um to modify an aircraft like this so uh they did that and in 2011 the water bomber entered service with the u.s forestry commission uh and in 2015 they sold the intellectual property to their customer in the u.s so they subsequently exited that successfully and now that is owned by a company i think neptune in the us so in 2019 trollos decided to leverage their intimate knowledge of the aircraft market um and their their regulatory experience with certification and look to diversify using additive manufacturing they put in three machines as you can see here at the top and one of the first projects that they are actually well on their way to getting what's called a part manufacturing authorization pma for is this engine control bracket shown in black here this controls the throttle cables that run to all of the engines of course being a british design we managed to have many many engines and many many brackets i think there are 16 of these brackets in an airplane these were originally magnesium they do have a finite life they suffer from corrosion and they are a cat one critical part you can imagine you can't fly if that bracket is faulty in any way so getting hold of these brackets now is a very lengthy and expensive process the world's most expensive part is the one you haven't got and again tronos are looking here uh at where is the pain for their customers and where can additive manufacturing make sense to them and their customers where is there a business case and there is a business case here so they're looking to get this component which is a cat one component but it's fairly lightly loaded and is therefore going to be printed in titanium rather than in magnesium and tronos have invested not only in the metallography that's required to do them to validate the materials performance but also the physical testing um so they're going to pull this poor bracket to pieces i think uh and so you know again i said at the beginning that these companies i'm talking about are really all in um and i think trollis is a good example of this but maybe coming at it from a a fairly well informed position where they're looking to leverage their existing knowledge of the market so i realized a lot of you won't be in aircraft i think we've got people from imp on the on the call today you're obviously an aircraft so there are some people who are in aircraft but all of you know who your customers are know your markets and you know maybe this is a good model for how you can use additive to um leverage your knowledge of the market to diversify and to relieve some of your customer pain so uh this is hot off the press we're in sherbrooke now um product quebec and uh this is a research technology organization that has been going for quite some time helping customers across canada uh adopting advanced manufacturing uh this is their layout of their cell that they have which is dedicated to what i would call modestly conventional manufacturing it may not look like your shop floor uh but it's the kind of stuff that product quebec does where it's looking at how do we automate all of this how and how do we learn how do we constantly improve uh what we're doing by feeding back from inspection um so that we can develop business intelligence artificial and and these kind of models the exciting thing that uh they're doing is they're entering the additive space and in particular the big ring at the top they're looking at uh part process and finishing which i think is a neglected area and it's a painful area but it's also of course one way you can differentiate yourself by being excellent in it so productive quebec it's a great resource for canada um they do serve all of canada they are in sherbrooke fantastic place to go skiing i am an absolutely terrible skier um but uh great great people vincent tomaset uh is in charge of that operation and he's hiring new people for this this this is very very exciting and they have um a very clear vision for where they're going to try and go and again i would see um this is uh you know for canadian customers big and small how are you going to de-risk uh this would be a this would be a great place um to uh learn with and here is their sort of road map um and this is tim simpson's maturity model the thermometers in the background it's an interesting model for maybe you know where would you measure yourself what's your plan in terms of uh additive adoption okay uh let's we've had a look at some some organizations let's have a look at some some material uh let's look at aluminium uh or aluminum um but let's call it aluminium and uh yes aluminium is lighter than steel uh the graph on the right says so we can make things uh lighter maybe if we use aluminium and there's a lot of light weighting going on across a whole variety of industries um for um greenhouse gas emission reduction a whole variety of reasons but the graph on the right at the bottom is kind of the kicker and what it's showing is that unless we can make uh the feedstock significantly cheaper in here this is saying a factor of 10. we're not really going to reach the billions of dollars um that is the potential of the market there and i think this story is true not just of aluminium but of all um all materials cost reduction is uh definitely high on everybody's agenda for these for these technologies so this material has been provided by uh a small but beautifully formed company called aquaspheres and that's exactly what their powder is uh small and beautifully formed and um they're out of they're operating out of ottawa and they are one of one of several uh material suppliers that we have in canada we're very rich in uh material suppliers knowledge and of course it's the kind of ikea model that we want to go for where we don't just want to sell you trees you know we want to sell you furniture and we don't just want to sell you powder we want to sell you components we want to add the value here in canada so uh ecospheres um uh believe that with that but don't don't believe they have white papers published on on this and that because the powder allows a very consistent process that you can not only get higher design allowables 30 you know what's 30 percent worth to you if you're in a high performance regime but also you can go significantly quicker um here they're saying three to four times faster potentially and that's worth an awful lot when these machines are expensive so if the machines run faster there's a very big economic case even for using feedstock that maybe isn't 10 times cheaper so again there's a complex balance here but we've got a very rich ecosystem in terms of materials and materials expertise in canada so i was going to take you now all the way to the west coast um to a company that has just been purchased it was previously known as repedia but it is now part of the x1 family and x1 is one of the one of the giants in 3d printing probably best well known for printing sand bolts so you can print your mold and then fill it with any metal that you like that's a fantastic value proposition and but they also do 3d 3d printing with binder jetting and now with the metal design lab which is has been developed here in canada this is a much more affordable fdm machine that lets you print one day and sink to the next and and have your parts um the the the clever bit about this and and again my apologies i'm presenting other other people's work but trying to do it in an agnostic way um but this is a water-based um fdm system uh so uh we have it's very friendly in terms of the both the economics and the hazards this there's not a de-binding step um and we can print internal channels um using the uh using the dual head extruder uh and center it the next center it the next day and actually the d the d binding step that i hadn't realized is actually painful not just in terms of time um but also in terms of maybe the cross sections that you can and can't do with other systems so if you were looking at an affordable metal system then again i would suggest that you know this ought to be you ought to be looking at something like this on uh on your evaluation so let's have a look at another machine here in canada check that we're doing good for time we are um this one is out of montreal a company called nano grande juan schneider and uh this is a company producing uh very high resolution parts um using if we flip to the next slide they can briefly control the cohesive forces and remove them to allow a very fine layer of powder to be produced and then use binderjet technology to allow very high productivity so they can produce parts on a resolution that really um hitherto hasn't really been possible by many systems so here we have some examples of very high resolution parts that can be printed quickly that the sweet spot for this according to juan is something that's maybe up to coffee cup sized um and we're getting very low shrinkages um with the binder jetting process like four four percent so those of you who know that that lets you get retain the very high resolution so we have high resolution high productivity so again nano grande in montreal maybe ought to be on your radar if you think that that could be um what you what you might need let's uh have a look now at something that's sort of we've looked at some materials we've looked at some machines something that's really maybe the intersection of the two this is a new company out of toronto called metafold um they're working in lattices they're working in mathematics and the beauty of lattices as the diagram on the bottom right shows is that we can create new material behavior with existing materials so we're allowing the geometry to work with existing materials to expand the performance universe so these are meta materials and of course i couldn't help but you know i always want to come up with a with a sound bite so i'm going to say meta materials could be better materials um so you know what could what could you do with metal materials one thing that the metafold are working with is a large sportswear company looking for high performance solutions using this but again you know it's it's definitely a wider area than this and metaphors are at the intersection of software and hardware they have their own machines um that can process these lattices very effectively with no loss of resolution um so um you know lasse's lattices i think are almost as misunderstood as artificial intelligence um so uh you know what could you do with uh with a different material behavior so you know if you think that could be of interest then alisa ross is the person to speak to at metafold this is not going to play which is sad um this was uh research across canada um i'm sorry that i i can't play that today um so let's just um and so my apologies to all of the fantastic institutions who are working to support development of better materials better machines um bringing down the cost of adoption um so let's just sort of uh finish up with um a quick look at training um so this is a little cartoon from uh the barnes group and on the left is uh what the design engineer thought they were gonna get and then on the right anybody who's been in this for a while and has opened up a machine um whether it was in your basement in a pile of spaghetti from a fdm machine or laser powder bed um you've probably had that uh oops that that wasn't quite quite what we thought so you know how do we how do we fix this um it's a good a good question we're not a simple answer this again is from the from the survey in terms of what skill sets i'm missing and anything with the colorful bars is sort of cause for concern and we've got kind of cause for a course for a concern um everything from design and materials knowledge through to the business case itself and and some of the principles and i think every institution uh can play a role in a continuum in terms of how we address this do we want phd's operating machines probably not um but our phd's one of canada's best kept sequel one of yeah one of the best kept secrets yeah i think they are in terms of um being able to add a tremendous amount of insight very cost effectively into an organization but we also need people need organizations you have your own people already so you know you need to get hands-on with the technology and that's really where engine fits in i think in terms of you saw that that map of canada with all of the uh institutions operations service providers resellers who are part of the landscape and you know engines job is to help you connect with these people um that uh can can help you um on your on your journey um so this was uh this is just a little example of the journey i've been on recently um looking at making some quite complicated optical devices uh the beautiful rendered image on the left was kind of what we wanted and this was actually prompted by the little cartoon on linkedin and we got involved in the discussion when one of my colleagues said hey i'm really struggling with this with the team i'm working with and the struggle was a bit like gulliver's travels uh here we have on on the right in terms of this these objects were going to be very difficult to print um so we got kind of pretty pretty hands-on with this with the team and really got hands-on with learning how to design for additive and in the space of in the space of a few weeks um we've really had a fairly transformational uh result so again this is this is this is the value of working with within the ecosystem in terms of how do you how do you learn about this and how do we get something that is really going to meet requirements so going uh again my video's not going to play at the end here which is which is a shame so we're going to be a little bit ahead of time here but you know we talked earlier on about disruption and you know how is additive potentially going to disrupt the landscape um and you know i put that well is it going to be 1 to 1.4 trillion is it going to be more than that and is it is it your is it your 1 that's going to get disrupted this is something that tesla is doing right now um you know and maybe elon musk and tesla and you know they're all companies maybe you love to hate but you know you shouldn't ignore them and they're consolidating parts um going from the assembly on the left to the one on the right with a massive die casting and this has some interesting uh ramifications for example they're going to need far fewer robots to put their cars together because now they're working with one very big component whether it's conformally cooled or not i don't know but again this is an example of disruption within an industry because people are thinking about the problems differently we've got park consolidation here and i would say that there's some interesting discussion going on within the car industry um clearly electric vehicles are going to be um they're here to they're here to stay their impact on the you know manufacturing of the internal combustion engine remains to be seen how that's going to work out volumes are likely to be different and you know initially of course they will be smaller and and additive mac manufacturing plays very well in that space in terms of no cost tooling which basically all of the technologies deliver um so i would i would urge you not to ignore additive manufacturing in your in your business um you know and again if we think in the automotive industry you know maybe you have decades of experience of making six-cylinder engines and and and will that be a competitive advantage in the future or not and you know what are you going to do about it um so the video doesn't play um and uh very happy to to take q a um now and hope that you know hopefully that was uh a quick a quick tour around and uh there's certainly going to be more time next week at the route at the round table to discuss it and i'll back to you sean thanks mark so as you noticed unfortunately we didn't have those videos played but what we will do as i mentioned is we'll include links to those uh in the follow-up email with mark's slides so that you can play them at your leisure um technology is always a great thing as long as it works as you intend so with that said as as mark mentioned we want to open it up for q a so there's two ways you can do that you can use the q a box along the bottom of your screen or you can simply type your question into chat so it does look like we have a q a so the first one here for you mark are there any concern about fatigue properties in lattice structures the demands of traditional design often seem to stop novel designs in their tracks how they flip and also have been would be no yes yes of course there are you know um the devil is always in the detail um and you know additive manufacturing is not you know it it's not immune from that so people who spring to mind in terms of working in this space damiano passini at mcgill and again i'm just gonna name people off the top of my head um doing some fantastic work in in exactly this space with um medical implants looking at the um the fatigue performance and often what happens when you print something you don't get exactly what you designed um so you have this model on the on the screen which is often very very difficult to simulate the math the the processing required for lattices the computational approaches that people are taking and that's why you know the company metafold is interesting um they wind up being really difficult to analyze um so they're very they're very tempting um and analyzing what you've actually printed when that's different from what you designed you know if a strut is meant to be 300 microns in diameter but now it's sort of 350 with some wobbles on it how does that really how does that affect your design so people like damiano passinia mcgill uh doing some fantastic work there um in not just in fatigue sean but also in you know the as manufactured condition um how much does that matter and we you know tools like computer tomography ct scanning um fantastic weapons and again i would i would advise people uh you know ct is maybe the first thing that you should do in terms of looking inside your component at the at the what have you actually got in there not the last thing that you should do uh definitely change my point of view on that working with research institutions like waterloo so okay great and we have some more here uh the next question uh the individual thanks you for the presentation so that's good um if you had to pick a primary metal material with the best uses cases for laser powder bed fusion what material would it be do you want me to ask that again yeah well the the best material for laser powder bed um i'm probably you know i i would gravitate towards titanium as being uh it's expensive so if we could use less of it that would be nice uh rather than starting with with lots of stuff it's high performance so maybe we really do want the fine features that laser powder bed gives us um so to take titanium would be probably my go-to but somebody said my friend ian brooks in the uk um one of his sayings is additive manufacturing is a constant hat eating competition um and it really is sean you just cut you can't predict to beg when i first centered this i was like why would anybody want to print aluminium you know it just made no sense to me coming very much from a subtractive background it's like well it's really easy it's really easy to machine there's no there's no there's no good answer um uh to what is what is the best material i think i think that the best answer is you know there's a conundrum between the promise of additive manufacturing which is this complexity for free any geometry you want and then it's a bit like ford's model t isn't any color as long as it's black well any material as long as it's only these three and and we definitely have to expand that materials you know universe um and you know again i think canada's working really hard at that in terms of economically how do we get a bigger materials universe so that you're you're maybe not fixed with the this you know what one material you're going to do and again companies need to be good at what they do so it does make sense um to you know make maybe you are really good at titanium um but you know you're probably also good at inconel and that and and you probably don't do plastic so i'm not sure that that answers it but but yeah there's there's there's no really good answer um and again you know a lot of these technologies i think the missing the elephant in the room there is you know well what's you know maybe what's the best technology what are you what are you trying to do with that this combination of materials and machines and and and geometry okay great we have some more questions here um the next question is it asks is there any development on the powder qualification process do you think the powder bed density is another critical parameter to track uh do i think it's a critical parameter to track um i don't have it i don't have enough uh experience in that area to really answer it but um i i think there are many parameters that uh affect the process for sure and one of the interesting approaches is how do you try to narrow down the hundreds of parameters that have some impact to a set that that is manageable uh and lets you deliver consistent deliver consistent product so it wouldn't be on the top of my thought list of of of things that you should be really careful with but as i said before um it is a constant half-eating competition and um you know i'm not saying it's not in i'm not saying it's not important but it wouldn't be top of my mind okay another question from mark he asks what metal has the best future in the direct energy deposition and large radius robotic arm um so you should definitely be asking people like uh tonya wolf out west you could ask uh promation you could ask water you could ask waterloo we got lots of people in that i would say direct energy deposition has a very bright future pardon the pun um because here i think the value proposition is let's put down material very quickly but maybe not supremely accurately but we'll put lots of material down just where we need it and then we will come in and we will machine it back to where it's where it's critical and we're very very good at machining and i think the analogy here sean is a little bit like the the tension between airplanes made in aluminium and airplanes made in composites and you know we've become really really good at making airplanes in aluminium um and we're really really good at machining so um you know again i think directed energy uh is definitely uh one of those technologies that is supremely interesting of course it's very scalable as well and we do you know it's it's welding um and as as many of these processes are um but it's a it has a very exciting future i think it's very under exploited right now um so you know in terms of what's the best metal um you know uh i i i would just get on i would just get get on and do it again it's what problem are you trying to solve and you know people like norsk are using titanium for boeing uh in i think they're in new york um using directed using directed energy and we've got uh people using you can repair with directed energy so you can either make brand new components or you can repair and of course we've got great capability in canada one of the companies they didn't talk about was burloken and their work with nrc and laser consolidation where maybe we can do directed energy with a really fine resolution as well so that's you know that that could be a game changer so um you know everything to play for sean okay one i think one of the themes i've picked up from answering some of these questions uh mark is is sometimes you need to back up from the question a little bit like your comment right now what's the question you're trying to solve don't don't start with the end and mind necessarily start with the the problem you're trying to solve um we have another one here from david uh he again he asked a very specific question but i think it's a good one um to form an aerospace component about the size of a coffee cup out of stainless how much would a machine be that is a great that is a great question and and i and i just i said sorry was it david who asked i suspect maybe he knows the answer um it's all changing is is the uh and what we're seeing is that there is uh um a potential uh i use autodesk favorite term but a democratization potentially of additive manufacturing and we saw with the x1 uh design lab machine um and they're not the the only company where we have desktop capable metal machines that are now um i won't say in the thousands of dollars but they're in the tens of thousands they're not in the hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars um so you know different machines with different capabilities um you know one of the old things was you sort of you pays your money it takes your choice uh and you know we we we are seeing now i think things that that you know i didn't think would be possible sean uh uh when i started only you know six seven years ago in this when we started with single laser machines we were sort of 10 cc's an hour and then we went to quad laser machines and a hundred cc's an hour as possible now slm has a 12 12 laser monster machine uh promising a thousand cc's an hour so there's definitely that there's a moore's law going on you know a lot of the complaints are often you know the machines are too slow they're too expensive um but there there really is you know we've seen three orders of magnitude improvement in uh laser powder bed and of course the the push back on that would be ah yeah but you know is the machine now three orders of magnitude more expensive no it's not but it is more expensive so again it's about how do we deliver how do we deliver more value but i think the the coffee cup size component is it's a really it's becoming a very heavily contested space which which is great for the for the customers great for canadian industry that you have many more choices now and and again you know get out there start learning the language um would be you know what i would encourage okay great so we have some more questions from a contract manufacturing perspective customers often require the assembly of metal parts but do not necessarily specify the manufacturing method of those parts the question is how can we man we how can manufacturers elevate whether parts sorry evaluate whether parts made additively are same fit and function as parts made subtractively just asking your thoughts uh okay tough well you know i suppose um there's an engineering drawing or an engineering model you know they're either they're they're either correct to spec or they're not um so uh i would say that additively you know um it's it's not normally a choice of of am i going to make it additively or am i going to make it you know am i going to fabricate it um there are there are cases like that uh but typically i think that um we're going to see more of an evolution where you're going to look you're going to just as the design knowledge um becomes more widespread you're going to get a component and you're going to immediately know that it's an additive component in the same way that you'll have no confusion am i going to put it on a lathe or a milling machine um or you know you just wouldn't be am i going to have to wire edm that feature it's clearly designed for that i think we will we will see um and we're already seeing that there are some parts where it's clearly um let's just say it's a very funky shape and you immediately sort of think additive but but it's often then not quite so clear sean whether uh the solution is uh should i print a sand mold and cast it or you know should i try to print it direct um but you know the business the business case is always what's going to dictate um the approach that you take great all right and another one um so additive manufacturing has been known for its lean manufacturing and environmentally friendly i guess outcomes ultimately in reality we do see a lot of powder waste and he comments on this any possibility we can cut down material costs by reducing this waste i i'm gonna i'm gonna say i think the biggest the biggest uh barrier to the sort of the waste the sustainability is uh it is not so much how much powder we waste because in practice um say for laser powder bed you would waste very little material um directed energy you might waste a little bit more because you're because you're maybe spraying powder or blowing powder but again you could be using wire in which case you you know you're really wasting nothing um i think that the bigger question we have to address is this will i use 10 times less but it costs 10 times more and then hey it was 10 times slower and then now it's now now i'm at a now i'm at a net loss um so the the i think we have to take a life cycle approach um to all of this and and again trying to minimize the waste of of powder is probably you know it it's it's one point in in the continuum we need to look at the you know there's some interesting work going on at loughborough on looking at the complete energy use uh in these cycles and and you know how do we use lasers effectively um is is one is one area so the the powder is definitely it's it's part of the equation but again it wouldn't be it wouldn't be my number one thing we're wasting too much powder um that that wouldn't be uh wouldn't be one of my sort of top three barriers to adoption okay um do you already see a new generation of engineers who grew up grew up with additive manufacturing and can't design for traditional manufacturing techniques anymore um a loaded question uh dwight is there a new generation yes um and and then it said and can't design for conventional anymore uh maybe they've never done you know maybe they've they've never known any anything different i think uh how what we really want are sort of the the polymaths if you like who can who can work with any manufacturing process um and and make sensible decisions and again software is is coming to our aid here with the ability to evaluate different manufacturing pro not just different materials and different stress outcomes or constraints but let's look at it from a life cycle perspective um what what are the different scenarios that typically an expert will be able to see different ways of making components sometimes of course we're blinded by our experience and we can only see the way that we know we know best um so i i often really like the fact that people coming into the industry come with no baggage um and you know it's it but but the idea of mentoring and and transferring knowledge and and how can software help us particularly when we're all working remotely right now you know how can how can software tell tell you what the outcome is likely to be i think that's a really exciting direction for us so yeah i know i'm i i i've seen amazing things from first robotics community colleges uh people who've who've you know retrained within the industry so you know i think there are a few people who get involved in this that don't kind of become fairly well addicted to it great so are the from your perspective are the greatest challenges to additive manufacturing adoption technical or the organizational market that's a great that's a great question technical or organizational uh i i think i'm gonna say it's organizational um because i think it's like yeah i come back to to uh it's about having a vision um you know and maybe organizationally uh you know we just did a survey uh within the the automation robotics sector and and you know it's a tough sell automation and robotics um and maybe not as not as tough as a million dollar uh metal printer might be but it's still a it's still a tough sell people are very flexible and companies are busy and there's often a perception that you know the company's not going to die today and it's not going to die tomorrow and there's always a bigger um there's always a bigger emergency and i think that he does maybe i mean i don't know what the number is i'm going to make it up sean but there's maybe 20 of companies um that really uh have a cup have a more of a culture of innovation they really want to grow they want to scale i think you know they're the companies who are likely most likely to adopt we saw at the beginning in that survey didn't we where um a lot of the early adopters actually were were speculative and we looked at the story of toronto's it's it's not exactly a sequitur that you go from converting 146s into water bombers into additive manufacturing um so maybe it's not for maybe it's not for everyone uh and you know that that probably is a cultural organizational thing um rather than a a technical thing i don't mean to be too negative there but i think that i think it's just true yeah no that's fair that's fair so here's our last question but probably a good one to to end on um what do you think are the top three pain points in adopting metal additive manufacturing top three pain points um [Music] the okay what is you know let's come back what problem are we trying to solve um do you have a good pr do you have a good problem to solve um it i think anybody who's had a business uh likes it likes it when they get a call from their customer and the customer says we're really in trouble can you help um that that's all that's always a great one as opposed to the customer says oh we want a price reduction of 30 or we're going to resource all of your parts um and and i've certainly certainly been on been on both ends of that so what do what is the problem that you're trying to solve and again hopefully the the run through showed that uh whether it's maybe it is maybe legacy components whether it's better perform better performance with using using last is that it what is you what is your what is your vision um the price point has been a barrier but i think that's a that's a perceived barrier rather than a real one there are a lot of ways to get into this that don't involve spending a lot of money uh collaborating on a project working with these organizations would would be great um but what what i would say is the the temptation to wait for something better to come along versus the how much organizational learning can you do by getting involved i i think there's i have no data to support my hand waving here sean but i do think that there's a trade-off between waiting and learning uh and i would i i don't think it costs much to start learning so that would be you know get engine to connect you um with with an organization and start learning there's only so much we can do in webinars and that we do have to probably get hands on and i'm a big fan of that that's probably a good place to end great well mark i really appreciate um yeah unfortunately the videos didn't work and as i mentioned we will get them out to everybody who signed up for today to join us but on the flip side we filled that time with a lot of great questions so you know things happen for a reason uh you've answered all the questions very well and and uh hopefully those of you who have joined us here today have walked away with some insights whether you're somebody already heavily involved in additive manufacturing or i think there's a lot of questions specific to where to start and and some of the themes that you mentioned mark are you know what problem are you trying to solve what are you already good at that might be the best place to to start and then really start to learn uh reaching out to engine whether it be myself frank uh you know we can connect them with yourself as well mark is is a great pay a great way to get plugged in if it is something you want to look at we can help you connect you with the right folks ultimately to help you move forward in that journey so really want to thank you for your time today mark i look forward to you joining us mark as well as those of you here next thursday at 11 a.m for our round table discussion uh there'll be lots more to discuss and i think mark will share what we may do is tee up a video one of the best ones that you have mark for next week is a kick off so that would be great because i think i probably the one i i feel uh um maybe people have seen precision's video but we did have one on research going on so if we get that chance that that would be good well thanks that's what we'll plan to do so we'll make it up but you have to come back if you want to participate so thanks everybody make sure you join us next thursday 11 a.m i will send an email with the detail we will share these slides thank you very much for your comments your questions and again for joining us here at our what's next thought leadership series everybody stay safe have a great rest of your day and we'll talk to you again soon take care everybody

welcome everybody as people start to join us here in the room my name is sean casemore i&#39;ll be your host for today&#39;s event so as normal it&#39;s top of the hour we&#39;ve opened up the room and people are piling in watch your step uh what we&#39;re gonna do is get started here in just probably one to two minutes i&#39;d like to give everybody enough time to get in get settled so uh just stay tuned here as we uh pile into the room maybe actually it shouldn&#39;t be crowded you should have lots of space um but yeah just stay tuned we&#39;re gonna get started in about a minute or so here just give everybody time to jump in so hold tight and i&#39;m just testing the audio here sean you can hear me okay okay do you want me to share my screen at this stage or not sure sure so again for those of you just joining us here we&#39;ve got quite a few signed up for today&#39;s event so we&#39;re just going to give it another minute here make sure everybody gets a chance to see this from the start so just uh stay stay tuned you probably have enough time to run for a really quick coffee if you want to so we&#39;re just going to give it one more minute here before we get to get started and jump into today so just bear with us that looks good mark so you&#39;re good to go there we&#39;ll just give another minute here just a quick technical question sean on zoom unlike teams will it automatically share the audio uh in the powerpoint do you think uh that is a very good question i think it will pretty quick yeah we&#39;ll know pretty quick all right so everybody uh joining us here today i think we&#39;ve got uh just so you just so you know just so so you&#39;re aware of of the impact these events are having uh for manufacturers across canada and technology companies obviously we had over 100 people signed up for today&#39;s event now if you&#39;ve attended any events what you may learn is that you never get everybody here that you that had signed up but as you also know we share the recording these events out with you so that you can watch them for 30 days i think that&#39;s the time limit that zoom gives us and then we transfer that over to the engine youtube channel um so we&#39;ll we&#39;ll make sure if you couldn&#39;t make this event today you&#39;ve always got this in your hands but clearly this is a topic that is the timing is right for all of our members across canada so my name is sean casemar i want to welcome you officially to today&#39;s event if you haven&#39;t seen or heard from me then you&#39;ve probably never been to these events i&#39;m uh i guess i call myself your host uh and i&#39;m joined by a partner in crime frank defalco he&#39;s our director of membership for engine and he&#39;s sitting in the background supporting us as well before i jump into introducing today&#39;s guest in today&#39;s topic you&#39;ll see in front of you as we normally do with these events we realize that the q a doesn&#39;t always provide sufficient time for you to ask questions for you to share ideas and share best practices things that you&#39;re doing so as with these events we normally have a round table the following thursday we used to have them at 10 a.m we moved them to 11 to try and line up the times for everybody so if you found you know interest from today&#39;s conversation uh whether you&#39;re watching this after the fact or you&#39;re here live with us and you&#39;d like to attend a brief round table there&#39;s no more than an hour to share ideas and learn more best practices mark is also going to be joining us there he&#39;s today&#39;s speaker we hope you will join us it will be next thursday march 4th at 11 a.m eastern standard time you will see an email coming from me i will share with you the slides from today as well as remind you to if you&#39;d like to attend to let me know and then i&#39;ll send the link out to you okay so stay tuned for that you&#39;ll see an email from me with more information and again the whole point of that roundtable is to continue the dialogue that we&#39;ll be having here today so before i turn it over to our speaker i would be remiss of not giving a brief introduction but i&#39;ll give a brief introduction actually of today&#39;s presentation because it&#39;s a little bit different this is ultimately today&#39;s presentation that mark kirby is going to walk us through it&#39;s an overview of the additive manufacturing ecosystem in canada from an industry research and training perspective uh it covers both technology developments application highlights and regulatory differences and lessons learned from a hands-on industry engagement so mark will share more about where did that engagement come from ultimately but ngem was involved and hence this is information we think you&#39;re going to find very timely now let me introduce our speaker today mark kirby after graduating mit in aero in astro engineering mark joined rolls-royce in the uk working on air-breathing rocket engines as he describes him before moving to his father&#39;s machine shop jet blades mark worked from all his way up from cad programmer to managing director making parts for formula one teams and rolls-royce jet engines in 2007 he immigrated to the maritimes in canada with his family and he provides provided hands-on coaching for companies introducing advanced lights out manufacturing he joined renishaw in 2013 to head their canadian additive manufacturing business and start up their first north american solution center and then in 2020 mark moved to the university of waterloo to lead industry training for additive manufacturing so there is nobody better positioned to speak not only about the results of this survey but about additive manufacturing in canada than mark kirby so with that said mark if you can hear me i&#39;m going to turn it over to you and mute myself great well uh thanks for that uh sean i like the way you led into that nobody better positioned well let&#39;s take this position up shall we here we have uh we&#39;re on board the space shuttle obviously i&#39;m a rocket scientist by training uh and canada is in the background there and the canadarm in the foreground uh lots of exciting developments recently with perseverance landing on mars and you know hopefully it&#39;s a it&#39;s a bright future technology is going to be our friend um so i&#39;m going to try and take it around canada um so please keep your hands and feet inside the ride at all times and uh hang on hopefully this will be fun so uh why is added this is the most boring bit of the presentation by the way um why is additive manufacturing important well according to wallers maybe it&#39;s 6.8 billion dollars worth of parts being manufactured that&#39;s parts not not machines that&#39;s parts and it&#39;s growing at a pretty regular 20 so it&#39;s a growth industry however global manufacturing added value is 14 trillion dollars so it&#39;s easy to dismiss additive as well you know it&#39;s really not that important however the projection is that it will represent one percent of all manufacturing in future and that would be worth about two billion dollars to canada&#39;s gdp and in terms of our crystal ball um you know i think one of the messages i&#39;d like you to take away is disruption who have you had global pandemic is going to have us all working from home for the next uh 18 months in your corporate strategic plan i don&#39;t think anybody did um so we don&#39;t really know exactly how it&#39;s going to be disruptive and by definition disruption happens where you least expect it so i just ask if you look look at this through the lens of not why it doesn&#39;t apply to you but how could it apply to you try to look at it through a positive lens i think it&#39;s it&#39;s easy to look at it through a negative lens okay so um we&#39;ve we did a survey uh across canada uh and here&#39;s there&#39;s a link to this uh to our results and we covered everything from plastic printing that&#39;s the kind of thing that maybe you&#39;ve got in your basement at home or your kids have got um all the way through to this is really what additive manufacturing looks like in canada that&#39;s a massive die casting tool with conformally cooled inserts produced by exco who are one of the leading companies you know i&#39;m going to pick them up but i&#39;m going to say in the world on this so if we look across canada very roughly there are about a thousand polymer machines excluding hobbyist machines the ones in your basement and they&#39;re the order of a hundred metal machines of all descriptions whether it&#39;s laser powder bed ded electron beam binder jet so that we literally we&#39;ve got additive manufacturing from coast to coast most of the installations in quebec and ontario but i&#39;m going to take you coast to coast today he hopes okay there we go so the we formed an advisory board with about 30 members from across canada from all different sectors uh and really this represents literally hundreds of years of experience i was gonna gonna make it thousands but i don&#39;t think everybody&#39;s got 30 years experience in it but it&#39;s literally hundreds of years of experience and many of the people who are part of engines additive manufacturing advisory board really are all in um you know they&#39;re they&#39;re betting everything on this so they&#39;re highly committed they&#39;re highly passionate and as you can imagine not everybody has the same point of view so the survey has some interesting reading uh here are here are some snippets from it for you i&#39;m not going to read them out uh there&#39;s many more sound bites inside the uh inside the white paper that we&#39;ve done and here are just a few of them so hopefully you can read quickly okay so one of the one of the interesting things on technology adoption is you know what why why&#39;d you go out and spend money and uh i had to be honest i had expected the answer here to be a lot more on the left-hand side that it was you know i went and invested in the equipment when i had the order in my hand somewhat surprisingly um we can see that in canada we we we maybe uh we&#39;re a bit more risk-taking so the the big orange bar is most people bought this to expand into a new market it was a speculative investment as opposed to it was it was a done deal and i think that was that was a little bit of a surprise um but again you know i think we&#39;re being we&#39;re being pioneers and hopefully one of the things you&#39;ll take away from today&#39;s trip around canada is that um you know we&#39;re a big country geographically we&#39;re small in terms of population and and maybe market size but we we always seem to punch above our weight this is a very complicated complicated uh swot analysis where we tried to ask people what do they think of the strengths uh of the canadian landscape and what are the what are the weaknesses all the threats the black line um starting from sort of positive on the left and negative on the right so uh unsurprisingly customers are seen as a real positive as is innovation and competitors on the far right has seen as uh as a bit of a negative a little bit a little bit hard because everybody has a different viewpoint on strengths and strengths and weaknesses and again hopefully today you&#39;ll be able to form your own opinion of what you think the strengths and weaknesses of the am landscape is across canada so let&#39;s you know we talked about disruption we&#39;re all being disrupted by the current pandemic um 3d printing certainly um has been a technology that has that has helped we&#39;ve all tried to help um i&#39;m gonna have to miss out today more than i can include uh when i said there are you know a thousand plastic institutions and a hundred metal ones then you can see that i&#39;m going to miss out a lot more i&#39;m trying to show some of the things maybe you haven&#39;t seen but here are some examples we&#39;ve got exege and renishaw and starfish all working uh on how do we use 3d printing to help uh alleviate the crisis whether it&#39;s making ventilators whether it&#39;s making ppe and of course ngen has supported a lot of work with vaccine development so um i&#39;m going to take a dive into uh one of the companies so i said i&#39;d take it around canada today and uh hopefully this is going to play okay our movies are not going to play that&#39;s a bit of a blow okay let me just see if i can do much let me just see if i can get this to get this to play here maybe it will play if it doesn&#39;t we can include the link in the follow-up email okay well um that i&#39;m just gonna drop i&#39;m just going to drop out of this and see if we can get it to play out of screen sharing let&#39;s just see if we can get it to play the kind of uh old-fashioned way here okay well fortunately i haven&#39;t got too many videos today so that was going to take us to precision adm who are producing the nasal swab among other things and this has now become the world&#39;s uh highest volume uh printed medical device that that&#39;s quite an accolade for canada um and there were some very good reasons why 3d printing was the right solution including some late changes to exactly how these the the geometry of these swabs and again 3d printing is great to accommodate that versus say injection molding uh where making changes to tooling is not fast um so 3d printing has certainly proven itself and there was a very interesting interview i did with martin patrick&#39;s ceo um i think he was he was surprisingly he&#39;s always candid and he admitted even he wasn&#39;t sure that 3d printing could really scale to millions of devices like it has done so that&#39;s a tremendous success story for for canada um now i&#39;m gonna take you all the way to the uh so we started in the middle of canada there in manitoba we&#39;re gonna go all the way to prince edward island now to a company called transjet uh tronos jet was uh founded in 2001 it&#39;s a relatively small company about 30 people um they&#39;re an aircraft lesser and trader their speciality is the british aerospace 146 or avro rj and they have traded sold and delivered about 60 of these aircraft across the world and in 2004 they uh formed a heavy maintenance organization uh let me just get my notes to be correct here they are actually um it is a faa eosa transport canada approved maintenance organization doing heavy maintenance on these aircraft and they subsequently embarked on the design modifications to modify the aircraft to be a 3 000 gallon water bomber and they achieved an faa supplemental type certificate for this so this is as you can imagine this is not a trivial exercise in terms of regulations um to modify an aircraft like this so uh they did that and in 2011 the water bomber entered service with the u.s forestry commission uh and in 2015 they sold the intellectual property to their customer in the u.s so they subsequently exited that successfully and now that is owned by a company i think neptune in the us so in 2019 trollos decided to leverage their intimate knowledge of the aircraft market um and their their regulatory experience with certification and look to diversify using additive manufacturing they put in three machines as you can see here at the top and one of the first projects that they are actually well on their way to getting what&#39;s called a part manufacturing authorization pma for is this engine control bracket shown in black here this controls the throttle cables that run to all of the engines of course being a british design we managed to have many many engines and many many brackets i think there are 16 of these brackets in an airplane these were originally magnesium they do have a finite life they suffer from corrosion and they are a cat one critical part you can imagine you can&#39;t fly if that bracket is faulty in any way so getting hold of these brackets now is a very lengthy and expensive process the world&#39;s most expensive part is the one you haven&#39;t got and again tronos are looking here uh at where is the pain for their customers and where can additive manufacturing make sense to them and their customers where is there a business case and there is a business case here so they&#39;re looking to get this component which is a cat one component but it&#39;s fairly lightly loaded and is therefore going to be printed in titanium rather than in magnesium and tronos have invested not only in the metallography that&#39;s required to do them to validate the materials performance but also the physical testing um so they&#39;re going to pull this poor bracket to pieces i think uh and so you know again i said at the beginning that these companies i&#39;m talking about are really all in um and i think trollis is a good example of this but maybe coming at it from a a fairly well informed position where they&#39;re looking to leverage their existing knowledge of the market so i realized a lot of you won&#39;t be in aircraft i think we&#39;ve got people from imp on the on the call today you&#39;re obviously an aircraft so there are some people who are in aircraft but all of you know who your customers are know your markets and you know maybe this is a good model for how you can use additive to um leverage your knowledge of the market to diversify and to relieve some of your customer pain so uh this is hot off the press we&#39;re in sherbrooke now um product quebec and uh this is a research technology organization that has been going for quite some time helping customers across canada uh adopting advanced manufacturing uh this is their layout of their cell that they have which is dedicated to what i would call modestly conventional manufacturing it may not look like your shop floor uh but it&#39;s the kind of stuff that product quebec does where it&#39;s looking at how do we automate all of this how and how do we learn how do we constantly improve uh what we&#39;re doing by feeding back from inspection um so that we can develop business intelligence artificial and and these kind of models the exciting thing that uh they&#39;re doing is they&#39;re entering the additive space and in particular the big ring at the top they&#39;re looking at uh part process and finishing which i think is a neglected area and it&#39;s a painful area but it&#39;s also of course one way you can differentiate yourself by being excellent in it so productive quebec it&#39;s a great resource for canada um they do serve all of canada they are in sherbrooke fantastic place to go skiing i am an absolutely terrible skier um but uh great great people vincent tomaset uh is in charge of that operation and he&#39;s hiring new people for this this this is very very exciting and they have um a very clear vision for where they&#39;re going to try and go and again i would see um this is uh you know for canadian customers big and small how are you going to de-risk uh this would be a this would be a great place um to uh learn with and here is their sort of road map um and this is tim simpson&#39;s maturity model the thermometers in the background it&#39;s an interesting model for maybe you know where would you measure yourself what&#39;s your plan in terms of uh additive adoption okay uh let&#39;s we&#39;ve had a look at some some organizations let&#39;s have a look at some some material uh let&#39;s look at aluminium uh or aluminum um but let&#39;s call it aluminium and uh yes aluminium is lighter than steel uh the graph on the right says so we can make things uh lighter maybe if we use aluminium and there&#39;s a lot of light weighting going on across a whole variety of industries um for um greenhouse gas emission reduction a whole variety of reasons but the graph on the right at the bottom is kind of the kicker and what it&#39;s showing is that unless we can make uh the feedstock significantly cheaper in here this is saying a factor of 10. we&#39;re not really going to reach the billions of dollars um that is the potential of the market there and i think this story is true not just of aluminium but of all um all materials cost reduction is uh definitely high on everybody&#39;s agenda for these for these technologies so this material has been provided by uh a small but beautifully formed company called aquaspheres and that&#39;s exactly what their powder is uh small and beautifully formed and um they&#39;re out of they&#39;re operating out of ottawa and they are one of one of several uh material suppliers that we have in canada we&#39;re very rich in uh material suppliers knowledge and of course it&#39;s the kind of ikea model that we want to go for where we don&#39;t just want to sell you trees you know we want to sell you furniture and we don&#39;t just want to sell you powder we want to sell you components we want to add the value here in canada so uh ecospheres um uh believe that with that but don&#39;t don&#39;t believe they have white papers published on on this and that because the powder allows a very consistent process that you can not only get higher design allowables 30 you know what&#39;s 30 percent worth to you if you&#39;re in a high performance regime but also you can go significantly quicker um here they&#39;re saying three to four times faster potentially and that&#39;s worth an awful lot when these machines are expensive so if the machines run faster there&#39;s a very big economic case even for using feedstock that maybe isn&#39;t 10 times cheaper so again there&#39;s a complex balance here but we&#39;ve got a very rich ecosystem in terms of materials and materials expertise in canada so i was going to take you now all the way to the west coast um to a company that has just been purchased it was previously known as repedia but it is now part of the x1 family and x1 is one of the one of the giants in 3d printing probably best well known for printing sand bolts so you can print your mold and then fill it with any metal that you like that&#39;s a fantastic value proposition and but they also do 3d 3d printing with binder jetting and now with the metal design lab which is has been developed here in canada this is a much more affordable fdm machine that lets you print one day and sink to the next and and have your parts um the the the clever bit about this and and again my apologies i&#39;m presenting other other people&#39;s work but trying to do it in an agnostic way um but this is a water-based um fdm system uh so uh we have it&#39;s very friendly in terms of the both the economics and the hazards this there&#39;s not a de-binding step um and we can print internal channels um using the uh using the dual head extruder uh and center it the next center it the next day and actually the d the d binding step that i hadn&#39;t realized is actually painful not just in terms of time um but also in terms of maybe the cross sections that you can and can&#39;t do with other systems so if you were looking at an affordable metal system then again i would suggest that you know this ought to be you ought to be looking at something like this on uh on your evaluation so let&#39;s have a look at another machine here in canada check that we&#39;re doing good for time we are um this one is out of montreal a company called nano grande juan schneider and uh this is a company producing uh very high resolution parts um using if we flip to the next slide they can briefly control the cohesive forces and remove them to allow a very fine layer of powder to be produced and then use binderjet technology to allow very high productivity so they can produce parts on a resolution that really um hitherto hasn&#39;t really been possible by many systems so here we have some examples of very high resolution parts that can be printed quickly that the sweet spot for this according to juan is something that&#39;s maybe up to coffee cup sized um and we&#39;re getting very low shrinkages um with the binder jetting process like four four percent so those of you who know that that lets you get retain the very high resolution so we have high resolution high productivity so again nano grande in montreal maybe ought to be on your radar if you think that that could be um what you what you might need let&#39;s uh have a look now at something that&#39;s sort of we&#39;ve looked at some materials we&#39;ve looked at some machines something that&#39;s really maybe the intersection of the two this is a new company out of toronto called metafold um they&#39;re working in lattices they&#39;re working in mathematics and the beauty of lattices as the diagram on the bottom right shows is that we can create new material behavior with existing materials so we&#39;re allowing the geometry to work with existing materials to expand the performance universe so these are meta materials and of course i couldn&#39;t help but you know i always want to come up with a with a sound bite so i&#39;m going to say meta materials could be better materials um so you know what could what could you do with metal materials one thing that the metafold are working with is a large sportswear company looking for high performance solutions using this but again you know it&#39;s it&#39;s definitely a wider area than this and metaphors are at the intersection of software and hardware they have their own machines um that can process these lattices very effectively with no loss of resolution um so um you know lasse&#39;s lattices i think are almost as misunderstood as artificial intelligence um so uh you know what could you do with uh with a different material behavior so you know if you think that could be of interest then alisa ross is the person to speak to at metafold this is not going to play which is sad um this was uh research across canada um i&#39;m sorry that i i can&#39;t play that today um so let&#39;s just um and so my apologies to all of the fantastic institutions who are working to support development of better materials better machines um bringing down the cost of adoption um so let&#39;s just sort of uh finish up with um a quick look at training um so this is a little cartoon from uh the barnes group and on the left is uh what the design engineer thought they were gonna get and then on the right anybody who&#39;s been in this for a while and has opened up a machine um whether it was in your basement in a pile of spaghetti from a fdm machine or laser powder bed um you&#39;ve probably had that uh oops that that wasn&#39;t quite quite what we thought so you know how do we how do we fix this um it&#39;s a good a good question we&#39;re not a simple answer this again is from the from the survey in terms of what skill sets i&#39;m missing and anything with the colorful bars is sort of cause for concern and we&#39;ve got kind of cause for a course for a concern um everything from design and materials knowledge through to the business case itself and and some of the principles and i think every institution uh can play a role in a continuum in terms of how we address this do we want phd&#39;s operating machines probably not um but our phd&#39;s one of canada&#39;s best kept sequel one of yeah one of the best kept secrets yeah i think they are in terms of um being able to add a tremendous amount of insight very cost effectively into an organization but we also need people need organizations you have your own people already so you know you need to get hands-on with the technology and that&#39;s really where engine fits in i think in terms of you saw that that map of canada with all of the uh institutions operations service providers resellers who are part of the landscape and you know engines job is to help you connect with these people um that uh can can help you um on your on your journey um so this was uh this is just a little example of the journey i&#39;ve been on recently um looking at making some quite complicated optical devices uh the beautiful rendered image on the left was kind of what we wanted and this was actually prompted by the little cartoon on linkedin and we got involved in the discussion when one of my colleagues said hey i&#39;m really struggling with this with the team i&#39;m working with and the struggle was a bit like gulliver&#39;s travels uh here we have on on the right in terms of this these objects were going to be very difficult to print um so we got kind of pretty pretty hands-on with this with the team and really got hands-on with learning how to design for additive and in the space of in the space of a few weeks um we&#39;ve really had a fairly transformational uh result so again this is this is this is the value of working with within the ecosystem in terms of how do you how do you learn about this and how do we get something that is really going to meet requirements so going uh again my video&#39;s not going to play at the end here which is which is a shame so we&#39;re going to be a little bit ahead of time here but you know we talked earlier on about disruption and you know how is additive potentially going to disrupt the landscape um and you know i put that well is it going to be 1 to 1.4 trillion is it going to be more than that and is it is it your is it your 1 that&#39;s going to get disrupted this is something that tesla is doing right now um you know and maybe elon musk and tesla and you know they&#39;re all companies maybe you love to hate but you know you shouldn&#39;t ignore them and they&#39;re consolidating parts um going from the assembly on the left to the one on the right with a massive die casting and this has some interesting uh ramifications for example they&#39;re going to need far fewer robots to put their cars together because now they&#39;re working with one very big component whether it&#39;s conformally cooled or not i don&#39;t know but again this is an example of disruption within an industry because people are thinking about the problems differently we&#39;ve got park consolidation here and i would say that there&#39;s some interesting discussion going on within the car industry um clearly electric vehicles are going to be um they&#39;re here to they&#39;re here to stay their impact on the you know manufacturing of the internal combustion engine remains to be seen how that&#39;s going to work out volumes are likely to be different and you know initially of course they will be smaller and and additive mac manufacturing plays very well in that space in terms of no cost tooling which basically all of the technologies deliver um so i would i would urge you not to ignore additive manufacturing in your in your business um you know and again if we think in the automotive industry you know maybe you have decades of experience of making six-cylinder engines and and and will that be a competitive advantage in the future or not and you know what are you going to do about it um so the video doesn&#39;t play um and uh very happy to to take q a um now and hope that you know hopefully that was uh a quick a quick tour around and uh there&#39;s certainly going to be more time next week at the route at the round table to discuss it and i&#39;ll back to you sean thanks mark so as you noticed unfortunately we didn&#39;t have those videos played but what we will do as i mentioned is we&#39;ll include links to those uh in the follow-up email with mark&#39;s slides so that you can play them at your leisure um technology is always a great thing as long as it works as you intend so with that said as as mark mentioned we want to open it up for q a so there&#39;s two ways you can do that you can use the q a box along the bottom of your screen or you can simply type your question into chat so it does look like we have a q a so the first one here for you mark are there any concern about fatigue properties in lattice structures the demands of traditional design often seem to stop novel designs in their tracks how they flip and also have been would be no yes yes of course there are you know um the devil is always in the detail um and you know additive manufacturing is not you know it it&#39;s not immune from that so people who spring to mind in terms of working in this space damiano passini at mcgill and again i&#39;m just gonna name people off the top of my head um doing some fantastic work in in exactly this space with um medical implants looking at the um the fatigue performance and often what happens when you print something you don&#39;t get exactly what you designed um so you have this model on the on the screen which is often very very difficult to simulate the math the the processing required for lattices the computational approaches that people are taking and that&#39;s why you know the company metafold is interesting um they wind up being really difficult to analyze um so they&#39;re very they&#39;re very tempting um and analyzing what you&#39;ve actually printed when that&#39;s different from what you designed you know if a strut is meant to be 300 microns in diameter but now it&#39;s sort of 350 with some wobbles on it how does that really how does that affect your design so people like damiano passinia mcgill uh doing some fantastic work there um in not just in fatigue sean but also in you know the as manufactured condition um how much does that matter and we you know tools like computer tomography ct scanning um fantastic weapons and again i would i would advise people uh you know ct is maybe the first thing that you should do in terms of looking inside your component at the at the what have you actually got in there not the last thing that you should do uh definitely change my point of view on that working with research institutions like waterloo so okay great and we have some more here uh the next question uh the individual thanks you for the presentation so that&#39;s good um if you had to pick a primary metal material with the best uses cases for laser powder bed fusion what material would it be do you want me to ask that again yeah well the the best material for laser powder bed um i&#39;m probably you know i i would gravitate towards titanium as being uh it&#39;s expensive so if we could use less of it that would be nice uh rather than starting with with lots of stuff it&#39;s high performance so maybe we really do want the fine features that laser powder bed gives us um so to take titanium would be probably my go-to but somebody said my friend ian brooks in the uk um one of his sayings is additive manufacturing is a constant hat eating competition um and it really is sean you just cut you can&#39;t predict to beg when i first centered this i was like why would anybody want to print aluminium you know it just made no sense to me coming very much from a subtractive background it&#39;s like well it&#39;s really easy it&#39;s really easy to machine there&#39;s no there&#39;s no there&#39;s no good answer um uh to what is what is the best material i think i think that the best answer is you know there&#39;s a conundrum between the promise of additive manufacturing which is this complexity for free any geometry you want and then it&#39;s a bit like ford&#39;s model t isn&#39;t any color as long as it&#39;s black well any material as long as it&#39;s only these three and and we definitely have to expand that materials you know universe um and you know again i think canada&#39;s working really hard at that in terms of economically how do we get a bigger materials universe so that you&#39;re you&#39;re maybe not fixed with the this you know what one material you&#39;re going to do and again companies need to be good at what they do so it does make sense um to you know make maybe you are really good at titanium um but you know you&#39;re probably also good at inconel and that and and you probably don&#39;t do plastic so i&#39;m not sure that that answers it but but yeah there&#39;s there&#39;s there&#39;s no really good answer um and again you know a lot of these technologies i think the missing the elephant in the room there is you know well what&#39;s you know maybe what&#39;s the best technology what are you what are you trying to do with that this combination of materials and machines and and and geometry okay great we have some more questions here um the next question is it asks is there any development on the powder qualification process do you think the powder bed density is another critical parameter to track uh do i think it&#39;s a critical parameter to track um i don&#39;t have it i don&#39;t have enough uh experience in that area to really answer it but um i i think there are many parameters that uh affect the process for sure and one of the interesting approaches is how do you try to narrow down the hundreds of parameters that have some impact to a set that that is manageable uh and lets you deliver consistent deliver consistent product so it wouldn&#39;t be on the top of my thought list of of of things that you should be really careful with but as i said before um it is a constant half-eating competition and um you know i&#39;m not saying it&#39;s not in i&#39;m not saying it&#39;s not important but it wouldn&#39;t be top of my mind okay another question from mark he asks what metal has the best future in the direct energy deposition and large radius robotic arm um so you should definitely be asking people like uh tonya wolf out west you could ask uh promation you could ask water you could ask waterloo we got lots of people in that i would say direct energy deposition has a very bright future pardon the pun um because here i think the value proposition is let&#39;s put down material very quickly but maybe not supremely accurately but we&#39;ll put lots of material down just where we need it and then we will come in and we will machine it back to where it&#39;s where it&#39;s critical and we&#39;re very very good at machining and i think the analogy here sean is a little bit like the the tension between airplanes made in aluminium and airplanes made in composites and you know we&#39;ve become really really good at making airplanes in aluminium um and we&#39;re really really good at machining so um you know again i think directed energy uh is definitely uh one of those technologies that is supremely interesting of course it&#39;s very scalable as well and we do you know it&#39;s it&#39;s welding um and as as many of these processes are um but it&#39;s a it has a very exciting future i think it&#39;s very under exploited right now um so you know in terms of what&#39;s the best metal um you know uh i i i would just get on i would just get get on and do it again it&#39;s what problem are you trying to solve and you know people like norsk are using titanium for boeing uh in i think they&#39;re in new york um using directed using directed energy and we&#39;ve got uh people using you can repair with directed energy so you can either make brand new components or you can repair and of course we&#39;ve got great capability in canada one of the companies they didn&#39;t talk about was burloken and their work with nrc and laser consolidation where maybe we can do directed energy with a really fine resolution as well so that&#39;s you know that that could be a game changer so um you know everything to play for sean okay one i think one of the themes i&#39;ve picked up from answering some of these questions uh mark is is sometimes you need to back up from the question a little bit like your comment right now what&#39;s the question you&#39;re trying to solve don&#39;t don&#39;t start with the end and mind necessarily start with the the problem you&#39;re trying to solve um we have another one here from david uh he again he asked a very specific question but i think it&#39;s a good one um to form an aerospace component about the size of a coffee cup out of stainless how much would a machine be that is a great that is a great question and and i and i just i said sorry was it david who asked i suspect maybe he knows the answer um it&#39;s all changing is is the uh and what we&#39;re seeing is that there is uh um a potential uh i use autodesk favorite term but a democratization potentially of additive manufacturing and we saw with the x1 uh design lab machine um and they&#39;re not the the only company where we have desktop capable metal machines that are now um i won&#39;t say in the thousands of dollars but they&#39;re in the tens of thousands they&#39;re not in the hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars um so you know different machines with different capabilities um you know one of the old things was you sort of you pays your money it takes your choice uh and you know we we we are seeing now i think things that that you know i didn&#39;t think would be possible sean uh uh when i started only you know six seven years ago in this when we started with single laser machines we were sort of 10 cc&#39;s an hour and then we went to quad laser machines and a hundred cc&#39;s an hour as possible now slm has a 12 12 laser monster machine uh promising a thousand cc&#39;s an hour so there&#39;s definitely that there&#39;s a moore&#39;s law going on you know a lot of the complaints are often you know the machines are too slow they&#39;re too expensive um but there there really is you know we&#39;ve seen three orders of magnitude improvement in uh laser powder bed and of course the the push back on that would be ah yeah but you know is the machine now three orders of magnitude more expensive no it&#39;s not but it is more expensive so again it&#39;s about how do we deliver how do we deliver more value but i think the the coffee cup size component is it&#39;s a really it&#39;s becoming a very heavily contested space which which is great for the for the customers great for canadian industry that you have many more choices now and and again you know get out there start learning the language um would be you know what i would encourage okay great so we have some more questions from a contract manufacturing perspective customers often require the assembly of metal parts but do not necessarily specify the manufacturing method of those parts the question is how can we man we how can manufacturers elevate whether parts sorry evaluate whether parts made additively are same fit and function as parts made subtractively just asking your thoughts uh okay tough well you know i suppose um there&#39;s an engineering drawing or an engineering model you know they&#39;re either they&#39;re they&#39;re either correct to spec or they&#39;re not um so uh i would say that additively you know um it&#39;s it&#39;s not normally a choice of of am i going to make it additively or am i going to make it you know am i going to fabricate it um there are there are cases like that uh but typically i think that um we&#39;re going to see more of an evolution where you&#39;re going to look you&#39;re going to just as the design knowledge um becomes more widespread you&#39;re going to get a component and you&#39;re going to immediately know that it&#39;s an additive component in the same way that you&#39;ll have no confusion am i going to put it on a lathe or a milling machine um or you know you just wouldn&#39;t be am i going to have to wire edm that feature it&#39;s clearly designed for that i think we will we will see um and we&#39;re already seeing that there are some parts where it&#39;s clearly um let&#39;s just say it&#39;s a very funky shape and you immediately sort of think additive but but it&#39;s often then not quite so clear sean whether uh the solution is uh should i print a sand mold and cast it or you know should i try to print it direct um but you know the business the business case is always what&#39;s going to dictate um the approach that you take great all right and another one um so additive manufacturing has been known for its lean manufacturing and environmentally friendly i guess outcomes ultimately in reality we do see a lot of powder waste and he comments on this any possibility we can cut down material costs by reducing this waste i i&#39;m gonna i&#39;m gonna say i think the biggest the biggest uh barrier to the sort of the waste the sustainability is uh it is not so much how much powder we waste because in practice um say for laser powder bed you would waste very little material um directed energy you might waste a little bit more because you&#39;re because you&#39;re maybe spraying powder or blowing powder but again you could be using wire in which case you you know you&#39;re really wasting nothing um i think that the bigger question we have to address is this will i use 10 times less but it costs 10 times more and then hey it was 10 times slower and then now it&#39;s now now i&#39;m at a now i&#39;m at a net loss um so the the i think we have to take a life cycle approach um to all of this and and again trying to minimize the waste of of powder is probably you know it it&#39;s it&#39;s one point in in the continuum we need to look at the you know there&#39;s some interesting work going on at loughborough on looking at the complete energy use uh in these cycles and and you know how do we use lasers effectively um is is one is one area so the the powder is definitely it&#39;s it&#39;s part of the equation but again it wouldn&#39;t be it wouldn&#39;t be my number one thing we&#39;re wasting too much powder um that that wouldn&#39;t be uh wouldn&#39;t be one of my sort of top three barriers to adoption okay um do you already see a new generation of engineers who grew up grew up with additive manufacturing and can&#39;t design for traditional manufacturing techniques anymore um a loaded question uh dwight is there a new generation yes um and and then it said and can&#39;t design for conventional anymore uh maybe they&#39;ve never done you know maybe they&#39;ve they&#39;ve never known any anything different i think uh how what we really want are sort of the the polymaths if you like who can who can work with any manufacturing process um and and make sensible decisions and again software is is coming to our aid here with the ability to evaluate different manufacturing pro not just different materials and different stress outcomes or constraints but let&#39;s look at it from a life cycle perspective um what what are the different scenarios that typically an expert will be able to see different ways of making components sometimes of course we&#39;re blinded by our experience and we can only see the way that we know we know best um so i i often really like the fact that people coming into the industry come with no baggage um and you know it&#39;s it but but the idea of mentoring and and transferring knowledge and and how can software help us particularly when we&#39;re all working remotely right now you know how can how can software tell tell you what the outcome is likely to be i think that&#39;s a really exciting direction for us so yeah i know i&#39;m i i i&#39;ve seen amazing things from first robotics community colleges uh people who&#39;ve who&#39;ve you know retrained within the industry so you know i think there are a few people who get involved in this that don&#39;t kind of become fairly well addicted to it great so are the from your perspective are the greatest challenges to additive manufacturing adoption technical or the organizational market that&#39;s a great that&#39;s a great question technical or organizational uh i i think i&#39;m gonna say it&#39;s organizational um because i think it&#39;s like yeah i come back to to uh it&#39;s about having a vision um you know and maybe organizationally uh you know we just did a survey uh within the the automation robotics sector and and you know it&#39;s a tough sell automation and robotics um and maybe not as not as tough as a million dollar uh metal printer might be but it&#39;s still a it&#39;s still a tough sell people are very flexible and companies are busy and there&#39;s often a perception that you know the company&#39;s not going to die today and it&#39;s not going to die tomorrow and there&#39;s always a bigger um there&#39;s always a bigger emergency and i think that he does maybe i mean i don&#39;t know what the number is i&#39;m going to make it up sean but there&#39;s maybe 20 of companies um that really uh have a cup have a more of a culture of innovation they really want to grow they want to scale i think you know they&#39;re the companies who are likely most likely to adopt we saw at the beginning in that survey didn&#39;t we where um a lot of the early adopters actually were were speculative and we looked at the story of toronto&#39;s it&#39;s it&#39;s not exactly a sequitur that you go from converting 146s into water bombers into additive manufacturing um so maybe it&#39;s not for maybe it&#39;s not for everyone uh and you know that that probably is a cultural organizational thing um rather than a a technical thing i don&#39;t mean to be too negative there but i think that i think it&#39;s just true yeah no that&#39;s fair that&#39;s fair so here&#39;s our last question but probably a good one to to end on um what do you think are the top three pain points in adopting metal additive manufacturing top three pain points um [Music] the okay what is you know let&#39;s come back what problem are we trying to solve um do you have a good pr do you have a good problem to solve um it i think anybody who&#39;s had a business uh likes it likes it when they get a call from their customer and the customer says we&#39;re really in trouble can you help um that that&#39;s all that&#39;s always a great one as opposed to the customer says oh we want a price reduction of 30 or we&#39;re going to resource all of your parts um and and i&#39;ve certainly certainly been on been on both ends of that so what do what is the problem that you&#39;re trying to solve and again hopefully the the run through showed that uh whether it&#39;s maybe it is maybe legacy components whether it&#39;s better perform better performance with using using last is that it what is you what is your what is your vision um the price point has been a barrier but i think that&#39;s a that&#39;s a perceived barrier rather than a real one there are a lot of ways to get into this that don&#39;t involve spending a lot of money uh collaborating on a project working with these organizations would would be great um but what what i would say is the the temptation to wait for something better to come along versus the how much organizational learning can you do by getting involved i i think there&#39;s i have no data to support my hand waving here sean but i do think that there&#39;s a trade-off between waiting and learning uh and i would i i don&#39;t think it costs much to start learning so that would be you know get engine to connect you um with with an organization and start learning there&#39;s only so much we can do in webinars and that we do have to probably get hands on and i&#39;m a big fan of that that&#39;s probably a good place to end great well mark i really appreciate um yeah unfortunately the videos didn&#39;t work and as i mentioned we will get them out to everybody who signed up for today to join us but on the flip side we filled that time with a lot of great questions so you know things happen for a reason uh you&#39;ve answered all the questions very well and and uh hopefully those of you who have joined us here today have walked away with some insights whether you&#39;re somebody already heavily involved in additive manufacturing or i think there&#39;s a lot of questions specific to where to start and and some of the themes that you mentioned mark are you know what problem are you trying to solve what are you already good at that might be the best place to to start and then really start to learn uh reaching out to engine whether it be myself frank uh you know we can connect them with yourself as well mark is is a great pay a great way to get plugged in if it is something you want to look at we can help you connect you with the right folks ultimately to help you move forward in that journey so really want to thank you for your time today mark i look forward to you joining us mark as well as those of you here next thursday at 11 a.m for our round table discussion uh there&#39;ll be lots more to discuss and i think mark will share what we may do is tee up a video one of the best ones that you have mark for next week is a kick off so that would be great because i think i probably the one i i feel uh um maybe people have seen precision&#39;s video but we did have one on research going on so if we get that chance that that would be good well thanks that&#39;s what we&#39;ll plan to do so we&#39;ll make it up but you have to come back if you want to participate so thanks everybody make sure you join us next thursday 11 a.m i will send an email with the detail we will share these slides thank you very much for your comments your questions and again for joining us here at our what&#39;s next thought leadership series everybody stay safe have a great rest of your day and we&#39;ll talk to you again soon take care everybody

Transcript for:Additive Manufacturing in Canada

Transcript for:
Additive Manufacturing in Canada