SPEE3D: Making Additive Manufacturing Easier Is Only the Beginning

It’s 2022 and additive manufacturing (AM) companies and technologies continue to proliferate, some more successful than others. While many new companies in this space claim to be unique and innovative, truth be told, relatively few actually are. That said, when we spot something that truly is innovative we take note, and feel that SPEE3D definitely qualifies.

We recently spoke with SPEE3D CEO and co-founder, Byron Kennedy, about his company and its unique AM technologies, materials, and processes.

SPEE3D is an Australian-based company and a manufacturer of metal-based 3D printers. The advantage of these 3D metal printers is that they’re very fast and also transportable. This means customers can put them in trucks or ships and take them right to the front line where parts can be manufactured and immediately used.

SPEE3D printers enable affordable metal additive manufacturing processes. They make metal parts quickly, leveraging metal cold spray technology to produce industrial quality metal parts in minutes, rather than days or weeks. The process is powered by kinetic energy, rather than relying on high-power lasers and expensive gasses. Finally, the process provides metal 3D printing at costs normally associated with traditional production methods.

How did SPEE3D get started? Kennedy said, “Our (he and the other co-founder and CTO, Steven Camilleri) background was in manufacturing. We previously had another company designing electric motors, sold that to a large US multinational and worked with them for near on 10 years in manufacturing. We saw 3D printing coming, but the reality is that it was just too expensive, and too slow. So when we finished up at the motor company, we wondered if we could take 3D printing into the production space and really solve this cost and speed issue. Thus, the company was born”.

“We came across our cold spray technology and further developed it. It was used by the US military, actually, for repair for a good 10 years. But no one had taken it into 3D printing. People had talked about it, but no one had ever actually done it. It was taking a known technology, which is cold spray, adding the robotics, adding the software and the ‘smarts’, and then packaging that all together. So that’s really where we came from — solving issues in the manufacturing space that we had experience with in our previous working life”.

Kennedy said, “The advantage of the process is that it’s very fast. So one of the challenges with 3D printing in the past has been that it’s been very slow. You can make some beautiful parts, no doubt. And when I say 3D printing, I’m talking metals. So most of the printers you’ll see out there make plastic parts, but we make metal parts with materials such as aluminum, copper, and stainless steel. Traditional metal printers have been very slow, taking hours, days, weeks, to build one part. With SPEE3D you can build a part in minutes and actually build that part right on the front line. And when I say frontline, I’m talking with defense, it could be where military fighting is occurring in the mining industry, it could be at a mine, in the oil and gas industry, at an oil rig”.

“You can build parts very quickly in a matter of minutes, right where you are working. The real advantage for this technology is being able to then solve those critical issues that you have in the field. So if you’re on an oil rig and you break a part or a mine site, and you break a part, it might cost you hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars per minute, that that site is not in operation. While you’re waiting for that part to come down, to be installed, you’re losing money. So now with this technology, you’re able to build those parts at the front line and to be able to get your equipment up and running much quicker”.

MCADCafe Interviews Byron Kennedy, CEO of SPEE3D

Rather than using heat to melt metal powders, SPEE3D developed “Supersonic 3D Deposition”. This is the name given to the patented process in which a rocket nozzle accelerates air up to three times the speed of sound, into which metal powder is injected then deposited onto a substrate maneuvered by a six-axis robotic arm. In this process the sheer kinetic energy of the particles hitting each other causes the powders to bind together to form a high density part with metallurgical properties superior to casting.

SPEE3D’s Product Line

Currently, SPEE3D’s product line consists of the LightSPEE3D and the WarpSPEE3D.

WarpSPEE3D are large format metal 3D printers that use patented SPEE3D technology, enabling significantly faster, more cost-effective, and more scalable production than traditional manufacturing. According to the company, the SPEE3D process is 100 to 1000 times faster than traditional 3D metal printing, claiming to be the world’s fastest way to turn a design into a usable printed metal part.

Kennedy said, “These machines are big, about the size of a car, so it’s a piece of industrial kit. You’re not gonna put it in your garage, these are industrial bits of equipment, but are designed and built to be transportable”.

What is the maximum build volume the machines can handle? Kennedy responded, “Roughly 3 feet by 2 feet, a little bit bigger than that, but just roughly in that area is a part that we can print, for example, the wheel for a car easily fits in that build volume”.

SPEE3D has a range of two printers for small to big size parts and budgets. “We have one which has a build volume of about 3 feet by 2 feet, which is the one I talked about, and the other one is about a foot by a foot, which is better suited for universities and for small parts”.

The company will have a new printer coming out later this year, so Kennedy said stay tuned for that.

Unique Phaser Nozzle Prints a Wide Range of Metals

Previously SPEE3D machines printed copper, aluminium and aluminium bronze.

You can now print even harder materials including stainless steel, titanium, high-strength aluminum and nickel-based carbides, thanks to the release of the ground-breaking Phaser nozzle.

SPEE3D’s Phaser Nozzle

SPEE3D’s cold spray metal 3D printers are already the world’s fastest, most robust, deployable additive solution to manufacture full-density, solid metal parts in minutes.

The Phaser nozzle is a new ultra-high-energy nozzle that has been designed to work with a wider range of hard phase materials. The high particle velocity achieved with the Phaser nozzle means more deformation of the particles during the deposition process, which allows harder, tougher materials to be made.

With Phaser you don’t need to rely on nitrogen and helium to cold spray the metal materials.

Using compressed air, the PHASER nozzle can effectively deposit material four times faster than the speed of sound at much hotter temperatures, up to 800 degrees Celcius.

You can also use nitrogen if you choose, but it isn’t required.

With Phaser, you can now 3D print in a vast range of new materials, including 17-4 stainless steel, 410 stainless steel, 430 stainless steel, duplex stainless steel, titanium, aluminium 5056, aluminium 7075, chromium carbide-nickel, tungsten carbide-nickel chrome and many more.

These materials are in addition to SPEE3D’s standard copper, aluminium bronze and aluminium materials.

This enables the rapid creation of more parts for industries characterised by severe service conditions, high stress, shock loads, and abrasive environments. Industries such as space, defence, auto racing, mining, and maritime can all benefit from this robust and reliable additive manufacturing process.

Metal 3D Printing That Meets Different Needs

Recently SPEE3D announced its first gold spray metal 3D-printed automotive wheel that benefitted from its unique metal printing process. Kennedy said, “As previously discussed, one of our main benefits is the ability to print on the front line. The other is actually building parts in a factory. So if you are producing a wheel for a car, for instance, you want that wheel to be high quality, as in strong, you want it to be low cost, and you want it to be fit for purpose. And really, that’s what this technology can deliver as well, so that’s manufacturing runs. And generally, you’d be looking at low- to mid-volume manufacturing runs. So when you talk about a mag wheel for a car, if you’re looking at volumes up to about 10,000, so not in huge volumes, but in those mid-range volumes, that’s where this technology will come in. And we could do that because the process is very quick, and it eliminates any tooling. So if you have a mid-range product or an out-of-line end-of-line product, you may not have that tooling anymore. You don’t wanna invest in that tooling. So why not print it instead”?

 When asked how long it took to print an automotive metal 3D-printed wheel, Kennedy answered, “Just over five hours. With a traditional technology printer, a wheel like that would be about a week or a week and a half. So you can see the factor of 10 to a hundred times quicker we can do with this technology”.

So what’s the magic potion for making this happen? “It’s the process that we use. So it’s a fascinating process, it’s called cold spray. And what we do is we actually shoot metal powders at supersonic speeds. We actually do have a rocket nozzle in there, so it is rocket science, interestingly. So we have a small rocket nozzle, and we use that to shoot metal powders at very high speeds. So let’s say a thousand meters a second or three times the speed of sound. So when you shoot a metal powder fast enough it hits a surface, and will then stick and create a full density part. And so there’s no real limits to the speed or the deposition rate that we can actually go to. So really, what we do is we then have a robot which then captures the powder particles in the right spot. And if you can control that robot, you can then build parts”.

With all that SPEE3D can do, Kennedy was asked if there are any limitations to what type of shapes that can be made and what types of shapes cannot be made. “As with every additive manufacturing process, there are limitations. We have a set of rules, guidelines, those sorts of things. But in general, I would say if your application is a cast part and 90% of the world’s parts, metal parts are usually manufactured using the casting process, we would be able to replicate most cast parts. So, there’s some very sophisticated parts which are done using other methods. We probably won’t be printing those, but it’s really replacement of cast parts. And those in the casting industry would, would understand that”.

The US Navy is planning to use SPEE3D for its MaintenX program.

“This development and opportunity are very exciting for us. Over the last two years, we’ve been developing this technology and testing it with the Australian Army. They’ve been deploying it in the field. So what I mean by that is they put it on the back of a truck and they take it into the middle of the bush, drop it in the middle of the bush and use that to then build parts at the point of need. At the same time people were asking us, you know, why don’t you put it on ships? MaintenX is that opportunity. We’ve been selected by the US Navy to put one of our printers on a ship and then take it out to sea. This will be a trial, looking at things such as will the rocking of the waves cause any issues, are the power requirements on the ship adequate, those sorts of things, and you need to go through these trials with rigorous testing. We’re very confident that we won’t have any issues, since we’ve already proven the process in field environments already, and there’s no reason that we should have any issues on the ship. So really looking forward to that opportunity work with the US Navy in that area”.

SPEE3D’s 3 Main Advantages

Although Kennedy already touched upon many of the advantages of SPEE3D’s printers, he summarized on what makes its printers unique and differentiated. 

“It’s three key things that set us apart. First, speed, we’re producing parts very fast. Second, cost, we’re comparable with existing manufacturing technologies. Third is transportability/deployability, or being able to put a machine on the frontline at the point of need. No one else in the industry does all of that. You put those three advantages together and there’s some really unique applications that our Technologies and process work for”.

Combined, these advantages are really what set SPEE3D apart from the competition. It’s a relatively young company, but its future looks very bright indeed!

For More Information: SPEE3D

Tags: 3D printing, ACTIVAT3D copper, additive manufacturing, AM, Byron Kennedy, SPEE3D, SPEE3Dcell, Video Interview

Category: Interview

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