Velo3D takes home the prestigious Aubin AM Case Study Award for its work with IMI Critical Engineering
The additive manufacturing industry has no shortage of pioneers and notable contributors. One of these was Richard Aubin, a United Technologies/Pratt and Whitney engineer who once beta-tested a novel technology known as stereolithography (SLA) from a small startup firm, 3D Systems. The year was 1988, and within four years, Aubin and his team would be among the first to also try fused-deposition modeling (FDM) from Stratasys Ltd. and selective laser sintering (SLS) from DTM Corp.
Dozens of papers and years of research followed, during which Aubin was named manager of rapid manufacturing at the United Technologies Research Center. He also chaired the National Science Foundation’s Rapid Mold Tooling Consortia and became a founding member of the Rapid Prototyping Association of SME (RPA/SME). In one early publication, Aubin said manufacturers that continue their stubborn adherence to traditional prototyping methods are like frogs placed in a pan of cold water; he noted that, unless they began embracing this new thing called 3D printing, they would likely suffer the “Boiled Frog Phenomenon.”
Sadly, Aubin isn’t here to see how many manufacturers avoided this unfortunate result; he died just five years later in 1997. Yet a small piece of his legacy lives on. The Aubin AM Case Study Award from SME recognizes exceptional examples of additive adoption and implementation, while inspiring others to continue in his footsteps.
Velo3D founder and CEO Benny Buller, together with his team in Campbell, Calif., are doing just that. A joint case study, “Laying the Groundwork for Industrial 3D-Printed Parts in Oil & Gas Applications,” documents their work with global flow-control solution provider IMI Critical Engineering, and earned them the Aubin prize over dozens of competing entries.
The paper starts by describing a few of the oil and gas (O&G) industry’s many challenges. For instance, the operating pressures and temperatures on O&G platforms are extremely hard on drilling, pumping, and control equipment, making component failures inevitable. And because lead times are typically quite long for replacement parts, with many of them no longer available from the OEM, facility operators must maintain a large supply of components, driving up costs. Having to expedite emergency parts from central warehouses to the middle of the Arctic or 50 miles offshore only adds to the challenge; failure to do so, however, could lead to a hugely expensive shutdown.
And yet, the situation is even more challenging. As in many industries, today’s metals, electronics, and engineering capabilities are superior to those used when many of these platforms were first deployed. But due to the massive investment costs and time required to design and build O&G facilities, there’s often neither the opportunity nor willingness to explore newer technologies. This sets up a cycle of less-than-optimal reliability and eventual equipment failure, followed by repair with decades-old componentry, all supported by the expensive, bloated inventories necessary to keep legacy platforms running.
IMI Critical Engineering’s O&G customers are painfully aware of this. The Birmingham, U.K.-based company designs, manufactures, and installs a broad array of valves and actuators for this demanding industry and many others, including power generation, metal production, and petrochemical processing. Some of these solutions are custom designed to meet specific operating requirements—together with the need for rapid replacement of legacy components, it’s easy to see why IMI decided more than eight years ago to invest in metal additive manufacturing.
There’s no need to rehash the case study and resulting Aubin award, except to say that the flow-control provider needed more than it was getting from existing 3D printers. Those interested in the details can download the case study from the Velo3D website. There you’ll find information on design optimization, multi-stage flow paths, and choke-valve cages 3D printed from Inconel 718.
What readers won’t find is the story of Benny Buller and his company’s evolution. Though he might not have started at the kitchen table like Scott Crump of Stratasys, building plastic toys for his daughter with a hot glue gun, Buller has continued to raise the bar on what’s possible with AM, taking his company from an early vision of “support-free” 3D printing to a publicly traded manufacturer of “end-to-end metal additive manufacturing solutions” with more than 200 employees, dozens of customers in the aerospace, energy, and medical industries, and a growing global presence.
Ironically, Buller once vowed to never invest in metal 3D printing. “After many years in the semiconductor industry, I spent some time in the investment community and heard stories about how 3D printing was this great technology that you could make whatever you need, and the only thing that needs to improve is the cost,” said Buller. “However, I knew from previous experience that when you’re in a race to reduce cost, it’s a race to the bottom. No one wins.”
Buller changed his mind after investing in a rocket company with some “very innovative designs” of parts they’d intended to produce via metal 3D printing, only to find the results were unmanufacturable. Using DfAM (design for additive manufacturing) techniques, they eventually modified their designs to accommodate existing 3D-printing technologies, but at the cost of lower performance. Buller decided to do something about it.
“I asked myself, ‘What if we could solve that? What if we could eliminate these design and manufacturing constraints?’ I knew that it would completely disrupt 3D printing, but at the same time, many told me it was completely impossible. This combination of disruptive and impossible challenged me, so I decided to commit the next decade of my life to solving the problem.”
It was Buller’s background in semiconductor manufacturing with its rigorous quality standards that brought him to the solution known today as the Sapphire family of printers. And while he’s happy to explain the many proprietary technologies that have made his company successful—among them a non-contact recoater system, powder bed height mapping, stringent control of laser parameters and the atmosphere within the build chamber, and software systems that help streamline the build process—Buller also has plenty to say about the industry’s many challenges and foreseeable future.
“There’s much more to additive manufacturing than the technology,” he said. “We and other manufacturers have done a good job in this respect and will continue to do more. But you also need institutional trust in the metal 3D-printing process and the components it produces. Trust and technology must work in tandem if you’re to achieve the higher levels of success needed to move the industry forward.”
Much of this trust will come from the establishment of accepted and well-documented manufacturing standards.That’s according to Zach Walton, director of energy solutions for Velo3D, who worked closely on the project with IMI Critical and was named several times in the case study. He pointed to the American Petroleum Institute’s API Standard 20S, “Additively Manufactured Metallic Components for Use in the Petroleum and Natural Gas Industries,” as one example, and a crucial first step toward widespread adoption of metal AM in this and similar applications.
“Industry standards are going to open more conversations about what additive can do and, ultimately, will create even more trust in the manufacturing process and the technology behind it,” said Walton. “The aerospace industry has led the pack on this and made some excellent progress, but we’re now seeing greater interest from other areas, oil and gas included.”
Education will also play an important role. Walton noted that IMI Critical used metal 3D printers even before Benny Buller started building them. He suggested the recent project may have introduced the manufacturer to design freedoms they were missing previously, but they came to the table with extensive AM experience. Not so with many late-stage adopters, which is why he and his colleagues at Velo3D are committed to making 3D printing and part design as straightforward as possible.
Said Walton, “That means continuing to simplify the process, refining the different pieces of our solution, and assisting with part and material qualification wherever we can—all of these things will make it easier for the next generation of companies to adopt additive manufacturing, which will ultimately transform their businesses.”
Buller agreed, but added that AM will also transform the supply chain. “We’ve seen that many OEMs do not wish to become vertically integrated,” he said. “They just want to work with a contract manufacturer that can deliver parts—3D printed or otherwise—at scale, on time, with quality and culpability. Achieving this will require the democratization of additive manufacturing, with a greater number of skilled, localized suppliers who can produce parts consistently and accurately.
“Once that’s in place,” he continued, “the industry will enjoy a newfound ability to shorten development cycles and provide products that offer greater performance than was previously possible, at a fraction of the time and cost, thereby accelerating innovation in this business.”