Essentium: Bridging the 3D Printing and Manufacturing Gap

Since in-person meetings are still not possible, we recently interviewed Blake Teipel, CEO and co-founder of Essentium, an innovative additive manufacturing organization that sets itself apart from the competition in several ways.

At its core, Essentium is comprised of builders, designers, and engineers who have experienced the divide between 3D printing and manufacturing and asked the question, “How can we bridge the gap in manufacturing?

Essentially, Essentium was born out of a desire to open new possibilities for builders and designers. It began in 2013 when four friends gathered around a kitchen table and thought about the possibility of what could be. The initial group wanted to create a new paradigm for using additive manufacturing in the industrial world. Simply put, they wanted to change how things are made.

Essentium exists to help propel its partners forward by addressing additive manufacturing, at scale, by delivering a supply chain solution that entails machines, materials, and processes. With its High Speed Extrusion (HSE) Platform, FlashFuse plasma technology, and its industrial-grade materials, customers are ensured they will receive a no-compromise solution for their needs.

MCADCafe Interviews Blake Teipel, CEO and Co-Founder, Essentium

When asked about some company and technology background, Teipel said, “Essentium is an additive manufacturing solutions company. What that means is that we make very fast 3D printers and we make materials for printing parts, particularly of an industrial variety. We are serving clients in the manufacturing space. You can find Essentium solutions anywhere from planes to trains, to cars, to computers, to shoes, so we’re sort of the stuff behind the stuff in terms of where we fit”.

What’s Changed (and Is Still Changing)?

For how the additive manufacturing industry has changed over the last several years, Teipel said “That’s a fascinating question. Over the last seven years, we’ve seen what I think of as a shift in the main paradigm, and when I talk about the main paradigm, I am now talking about the ability to additively manufacture things that you cannot easily design”.

“When I was a designer, I worked for Caterpillar and John Deere, and have lots of hours designing products with CAD software. You could design things that you could not make, but now in the last seven years, we’ve seen the rise of capability in many different technology types for additive to where the reverse is now true. Now the software is behind what is possible to be built, and that is the main change that I’ve seen in additive manufacturing”.

What has surprised him the most is the fact that now you can create things using parameters. “You could sort of say, ‘Okay, I’d like for my widget to sustain a certain number of cycles or a certain load, or to weigh a certain amount’. No longer do you say, ‘I want it to be shaped in this way. I want it to be such and such a thickness or such and such a length or width’. Sometimes you have boundary conditions, which of course you have to constrain, but you could now tell the software, which is coming along as well, to say, ‘I would like this to’, again, ‘Carry a certain load or be made of a certain material and have these characteristics mechanically’. You’re starting to see this progression to where parameter-driven design is starting to be prevalent, and that’s a huge push forward for manufacturing writ large, but also I think for additive in particular”.

Essentium’s customers’ needs have changed over this time period, too. “In the last seven years, our customers have become much more educated and so their needs have become, I would say, a little bit more nuanced and more sophisticated. We’re seeing a rise in customer adoption at the enterprise level. Now it’s early, this is something that’s still early, but we’re seeing more and more enterprise users who have been researching strategies and in some case, putting strategies in place over the last seven years, and so in this period, we’re starting to see greater levels of implementation”.

“The needs are becoming more sophisticated in the way in which the value must be delivered. No longer is it just sort of additive manufacturing on the design side, no longer is it just additive on prototyping or part development, but now we’re starting to see over the last seven years, we’re seeing adoption into more of a manufacturing context, more of a production environment. And those are movements, I think, certainly, which will continue, of course, but over the last seven years, that’s the maturing that we’ve seen of the technology to make that possible”.

To reinforce this claim, in early February, Essentium, Inc announced the results of the second in a series of findings from independent global research on the current and future use of industrial 3D printing. The company previously covered the first survey published in 2019, which focused mainly on the slow adoption of additive manufacturing for mass-production. This new survey showed significant advancements in that particular arena as well as significant benefits for users of industrial additive manufacturing while also highlighting remaining challenges to overcome, notably concerning the cost of 3D printing technologies and materials.

The survey found that investments in 3D printing at an industrial-scale are paying off, with companies reporting wide-ranging benefits, including high part performance [46 percent], cost reduction [46 percent], and speed-to-part [45 percent].

Overall, the results were promising as they showed growth in adoption of AM and that investments in 3D printing are paying off for many manufacturers. An earlier Essentium survey found that 3D technology had enormous potential but that industry had been slow at adopting it for mass-production.

Innovations Shaping the AM Industry

Teipel said there are several significant events and innovations that have shaped the industry.

He said, “Certainly, we’ve seen a rise in new types of additive processes. If you look at the major technology process types in additives, if you go back, 29, 30 years, when additive was first invented, you really only had three technology types. You had extrusion of the polymer systems primarily, you had sort of a powder bed fusion, so that was sort of SLS or selective laser sintering, where you would sort of have a bed of powder and you would fuse the powder together, or you had photopolymers through stereolithography”.

“In the early days, you really only had three technology types that you could use. Now there are seven recognized types of additive manufacturing. A lot of people think, ‘Well, 3D printing is 3D printing’. But in fact, there’s so much more variety to what can be printed and the way in which you can use additive, and a lot of that came about in the last seven years. Things like the multi-jet fusion technology, binder jetting has seen a strong rise in the last seven years, directed energy deposition, where you’ve got lasers or an energy source, you see cold spray technologies now making their way into additive. So really, it’s tough to pin down one or two key things from my perspective, but I would certainly say there’s been just this expansion in the types of technologies as well in the additive space”.

Essentium and the Future

When asked what the next seven years look like for the industry and Essentium, Teipel said, “For the industry in the next the next seven years, we’re going to see more adoption into production, so we’ll see continued growth, I would say in the industrial sectors, so whether it’s aerospace or automotive or even consumer goods. I think consumer goods manufacturing is probably a key sector that I would expect to see large growth in the next seven years from an additive perspective. And then certainly some of the classic spaces like electronic device manufacturing, the things for which additive is a good solution, in tooling and jigs and fixtures and things like that. We’ll see, I think a tremendous rise really in all sectors from a production context”.

Which manufacturing sectors will lead in additive manufacturing?

Teipel said, “It’s interesting. From a leadership perspective, we see continued and sustained growth in aerospace, and that’s not new. But the surprising thing for me is the degree to which aerospace is still very ripe for adoption. Aerospace is still very ripe for additive solutions at larger scales. One of the most famous use cases, of course, would be the fuel nozzle use case that was put into practice. Greg Morris worked on this and then the folks at GE Aviation did, and the LEAP engines that went into production for Boeing and Airbus airplanes, they used 3D-printed fuel nozzles and that happened five or six years ago or so. But now, GE released the first all-new turboprop engine that really has been released in the last 50 years and that turboprop engine has a tremendous amount of additively manufactured componentry in the engine. They consolidated, I think it was 300 parts down to 12 and so you see this rise of capability just within aerospace, and I think that’s going to be a continued leadership position”.

“I also expect to see automotive really pick up in the next seven years. We still don’t see additive at large scales within the automotive context and I think that’s true for two reasons. Automotive is at the end of the day, a consumer niche. Not a niche, but a consumer industry. The margins are very thin and the rise of pressures for costs and the relenting, commoditization in automotive. Those are all pressures that would make it difficult to succeed using additive where the cost basis has classically been too high. That’s going to change in the next seven years and we’ll see automotive applications at greater scales from additive”.

“Biomedical, I think we’ll see an ever-increasing rise of implanted devices inside the human body, so in vivo devices. We’ve already seen examples of stents and tumor solutions for bone in the jaw or bone in the head, and other things that are 3D printed or additively manufactured using metals. I think we’ll also see a rise of polymer solutions in biomedical. So, it’s tough for me to say which sector will lead, but we’ll see continued growth in many areas in the next seven years”.

The sector that Teipel thinks is the topmost sector right now is a large adoption in aerospace from an enterprise perspective. “We see certified materials, for example, that are flying on airplanes and in fact, there’s about to be a second material, for example, that’s certified for flight-critical, flight-worthy applications, so you’ll continue to see more of a rise there. Certainly, if you back up into cross-sector capabilities, like prototyping, that still leads. Prototyping today is still the most dominant usage of additive manufacturing and prototyping, that’s not going away. Additive will continue to be a wonderful technology solution for prototyping. Again, that will grow as well, but I think this rise of adoption in the industrial sector is the thing that certainly has me the most excited and a lot of us in the industry the most excited”.

When asked to elaborate about the next seven years, Teipel expects to see a lot more commercial production parts being done using additive instead of just prototypes or tooling.

“I think that’s absolutely going to be the case. I mentioned earlier how there were three types of additive in the early days and now there are seven. Well, part of the movement in the technology over the last seven years has actually been to offer some disruption to some of those early technology types. Stereolithography, for example, has seen a challenge in a new technology type which has been popularized by the company, Carbon. So this is a membrane-based oxygen permeation technology that prints parts very, very rapidly and so that moves the cost curve. And then classic laser sintering has seen HP to come to the fore with high speed sintering through their multi jet fusion process and we’re seeing more single-pass jetting. There’s a lot of discussion now in the space from Desktop Metal with their single-pass jetting technology”.

“Recently, there were some announcements by a company called Evolve. They have some electrophoretic single-pass jetting technology and so we’re seeing more high-speed applications. Of course, not to toot our own horn too much, but Essentium is offering, through the high-speed extrusion technology that we have, we’re offering five to 15x speed advantage over classic extrusion. All of these speed advantages, when you see them lining up, that means the cost curves are coming down and so we’ll be able, from a consumer standpoint, to recognize more customization, more consumer preference, lower lead times and shorter design cycles for products that we’d like to see in the consumer space because costs are coming down and additive is becoming more capable from a production perspective”.

Not Just Processes, But Materials, Too

Beyond machines and processes, Teipel said that Essentium also excels in materials, as well.

“We’re really strong on the thermoplastic composite side, especially engineering thermoplastics — everything from nylons to thermoplastic urethanes, which is an elastomer, to aerospace-grade materials like Ultem, which is a SABIC chemistry, sulfonated chemistries, also polyetherimides. If you look at engineering thermoplastics, this is a broad range. In fact, it’s the broadest range of plastic materials that are out there, ABS, polycarbonate, PET. PET is what water bottles are made out of. So engineering-grade thermoplastics. Again, broadly, that’s the type of materials that we offer, so it’s a very wide range of solutions for the industrial user”.

Innovative materials also include carbon fiber. Teipel said, “We’ve got five grades of carbon fiber-infused material. So we just recently launched a carbon fiber-infused PET. So going back to the PET, that’s a polyethylene terephthalate. It’s a really low-cost utility grade plastic. When you infuse it with carbon fiber,  those capabilities of the material go way up, but the cost stays very reasonable for engineering applications. So that’s one of the reasons we like our carbon fiber PET. We’ve got carbon fiber high-temperature nylon, which has a polyphthalamide blend, which is really great for thermal stability, mechanical strength, and solvent resistance. When you stiffen that material with carbon fiber then you can use it for tooling and molds, and other high-pressure applications. So certainly the carbon fiber-infused materials are among our most demanding materials for those high-spec environments”.

As for metal printing, Does Essentium have any solutions or plans for this area?

“The short answer is stay tuned, but we also have metal solutions that we’ve looked at and worked with through our partner BASF. We have a 316 stainless steel and a 17-4 stainless steel that would be printable on an Essentium HSE platform to create a green part, and then the green part can be de-bound and sintered in a post-secondary operation to create a fully dense metal part. The thing I like the most about these solutions is we use what’s called catalytic de-binding. There are actually three different ways to de-bind metal parts. Desktop Metal and Markforged and others use de-binding as well. One of the advantages of the catalytic de-binding process is that it’s chemically very clean. You produce a microstructure that does not have carbides and oxides that are in excess left behind in the grain structure, so you get, again, chemically a very clean part and so that’s one of the advantages of catalytic de-binding, and that’s available, that metal material is available on an Essentium platform”.

Essentium Going Public?

Is Essentium planning on going public?

“We’ll see what the future holds, but I will tell you the market is very active right now in the IPO space. So we’re taking a look at it very carefully.

Since Wall Street has created this new mechanism called special-purpose acquisition corporation, (SPAC) and Desktop Metal went public with that. Do you see more AM companies going public in the coming year?

Teipel said, “Yes, because the thing that I like the most about the SPAC process, and it’s actually a process that’s been around for a long time. IPOing via SPAC. Certainly, it’s gained increased popularity in the last couple of years, I think, 600% to 700% more activity in the IPO space via SPAC in 2018, 2019 than in years prior. So people understand SPACs a lot better, the controls around SPACs are a lot tighter, it used to be these SPACs were sort of disfavored because you’d see penny stocks and other things that would go public through so-called blank-check companies. That’s really not the case anymore. Now, you could actually utilize a SPAC process to potentially go public much more quickly and for a lower cost than a classic IPO. In 2014, 2013, 2012, you saw a decent amount of IPO activity in the additive manufacturing space. I think Materialise had an IPO on the NASDAQ, Stratasys had an IPO as well, and any others, XJet is public, and there are others, but those processes, they took a long time, and it cost a lot of money to go public”.

“In an industry like AM where the industry is changing or growing double digits every year, even last year, it was still projected to grow, 2020 was largely a down year in the industry. The final numbers aren’t in yet, but still largely, people thought that in 2020 additive would still grow by double digits, not the 30% of the past, 25% to 30% of the past, but a lower double-digit growth. By employing new financing mechanisms and financing tools, potentially like SPACs, I wouldn’t be surprised if there are numerous announcements from additive manufacturing companies who will also find an attractive opportunity there to capitalize their business and grow the industry”.

“The reason why I think that’s so important, if you look at global manufacturing, this is a multi-trillion dollar industry, global manufacturing is huge, additive manufacturing is tiny, but additive manufacturing has a lot of opportunity to grow relative to actual manufacturing or commercial manufacturing, and hopefully, we can see a wide palette of companies that are well-capitalized to grow and really help provide new solutions where the consumer wins at the end of the day”.

Changes over the last year showed 3D printing’s relevance in manufacturing. The AM industry proved it could step in to make quantities of supplies at scale to keep assembly lines moving; it showed 3D printing is ready for prime time. 2021 will mark the year that additive at scale transforms manufacturing across sectors, including aerospace, automotive, electronics manufacturing services, and biomedical.

Teipel summed things up by saying, “We are committed to innovation in both materials and production platforms. We are committed to creating industrial solutions and we are committed to you. We believe the future lies with our customers, and we are here to help you find tomorrow’s solutions”.

For More Information: Essentium

Tags: 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AM, Blake Teipel, Essentium, High Speed Extrusion, HSE, Video Interview

Category: Interview

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