VulcanForms: Laser focused on the production line of the future

“Manufacturing is critical to our national security, our health and our ability to explore new worlds and advance the human condition... VulcanForms exists to move manufacturing forward and be a small piece, hopefully a very important piece, of that future.” 

VulcanForms is an MIT-born company that builds and operates advanced digital manufacturing infrastructure, founded in 2015. It’s named after Vulcan, the roman god of fire and metalworking. Why? Because the company has developed an innovative new way of manufacturing intricate metal parts on an industrial scale. They use metal additive manufacturing, a form of 3D printing to print engineered metal components that require precise designs and complex structures. This means they can have a production line that can at one time be making components for medical devices, then switch to making consumer electronics, and another week be making products for aviation, space exploration or the defence industry.

What’s more this production line is quieter, cleaner and greener than ever more! Manufacturing  components this way instead of the traditional method of forging them cuts down on costs and removes the need for a supply chain.

In this episode, Co-Founder John Hart takes us around VulcanOne, VulcanForm’s Foundry in Massachusetts, to find out more. We also hear from Brian Thompson at PTC, who tells us about how the 3D CAD software Creo helps the team at VulcanForms collaborate on their designs to perfect this alternative manufacturing process.

VulcanForms is supported by PTC Partner PDS Vision, find out more about here

Find out more about Creo here

Your host is Paul Haimes from industrial software company PTC.

Episodes are released bi-weekly. Follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter for updates.

Third Angle is an 18Sixty production for PTC. Executive producer is Jacqui Cook. Sound design and editing by Clarissa Maycock. Location recording by Curt Nickisch. And music by Rowan Bishop.

Transcript

Welcome to Third Angle, where you find us shaking up digital manufacturing by 3D printing the metal products of the future.

I’m your host, Paul Haimes, from industrial software company PTC. In this podcast, we share the moments where digital transforms physical and meet the brilliant minds behind some of the most innovative products around the world – each powered by PTC technology.

Imagine you’re standing in a factory that makes products out of metal. It’s loud, right? With lots of machines tooled to make very specific products. But what if there was another way of manufacturing metal products and components, one that is virtually silent, a factory that has no production line? Can the traditional manufacturing process really be digitised? 

VulcanForms, supported by PTC Partner PDSVISION, was founded in 2018 and set out to revolutionise 3D printing. They use a technique called laser bed powder fusion to print engineered components for products such as medical devices and consumer electronics. They also make products for aviation, space exploration and the defence industry. Instead of the traditional manufacturing method of the metal being cast and forged, the metal parts are 3D printed when a laser is passed over a powdered metal. This cuts down on costs by reducing the physical supply chain needed to make the metal parts. Plus, the precise positioning of the lasers allows for very intricate designs and patterns to be printed, meaning that new product designs can be created and with less risk – and less cost. 

We sent our producer Curt Nickisch to VulcanOne, VulcanForm’s Digital Design Lab in Massachusetts, to meet co-founder John Hart and to find out more about how they are using their 3D printers to create high quality, high-precision goods at an industrial scale. 

I’m John Hart, co-founder of VulcanForms and professor and department head in mechanical engineering at MIT. This is Vulcan 1, VulcanForm’s first production facility in Devins, Massachusetts. The facility is more than 150,000 square feet, and we do integrated digital production, including additive manufacturing by laser powder bed fusion. 

In this facility, we produce engineered components for some of the world’s largest and most innovative companies, companies that make breakthrough medical devices, consumer electronics, components for aviation, space and defence applications, and more. So, products such as watches, whether electronic watches or traditional watches, typically have a metallic housing, which might be traditionally cast or forged and precision machined. We can transform the production of those components, and significantly compact the supply chain using digital manufacturing, using 3D printing as the first part of the process. 

When we started VulcanForms in 2015, Martin [Feldman, the CEO of VulcanForms] and I had an idea for a new machine architecture to do metal 3D printing. And early on, we decided we wanted to build the company to do production rather than build and sell machines. Over time, our perspective on that being the way to create scale, to create impact, not just through additive manufacturing, but through digital manufacturing, integrated production overall has only become stronger. The world has realised that 3D printing is different; that by printing objects, instead of casting them or forging them or machining them, you can open up new dimensions of flexibility and you could enable entirely new categories of products. But even today, 3D printing is really a drop in the bucket, or less, of manufacturing overall.

Here is DP1, or Devins Printer Number 1, the first printer we built here in the Devins facility. We’re obviously very creative about our printer names! This is VulcanForms’ proprietary laser powder bed fusion technology. If you’re a 3D printing nerd like I am, you’ve heard of laser powder bed fusion before, and we founded the company to rearchitect this established additive manufacturing technology for an industrial scale. This printer is, first, a lot larger than most printers, if not all printers you’ve ever seen before. But it executes the same basic process: it takes metal powder as a feedstock, each powder particle is a little sphere with diameter similar to that of human hair, and it produces finished components on the build plate. And that digital transformation from powder to finished part is the essence of additive manufacturing, is the essence of digital manufacturing. To bring this machine to life, we had to design the machine and build it entirely in-house, and through a network of suppliers, including several proprietary components and subsystems, that differentiate our technology and make it work at the level that it does. 

Using digital manufacturing, you can shorten design cycles, you can explore new product designs, new materials, with less risk, less cost. And that’s very important to the customers we work with, who want to stay ahead of competition by having better products brought to market more quickly. In the software world, we have enterprise-level software, enterprise-level relationships. We really want to, and are, building enterprise-level relationships with customers so they understand the capabilities that we can offer, and how we can jointly evolve our capabilities and our relationship over time to become trusted partners where they can make product design advances hand-in-hand with advancements and growth of our manufacturing technology and growth of our footprint. 

Every time the printer prints a layer, a gantry system scans over the powder bed, and the precise control of the firing of the lasers with the position of the gantry over the powder bed is what builds the part. So, you can think of a part as this intricate 3D geometry, or you can think of it as an array of three-dimensional pixels or voxels. And our ability to control the energy we deliver to the powder bed within each layer and across the layers is what lets us achieve the high level of quality, consistency and material and geometric flexibility that makes customers attracted to our technology and our overall integrated capabilities. 

Laser powder bed fusion is one layer at a time, just like many other 3D printing processes. But instead of, say, a desktop plastic printer squeezing polymer out of a nozzle, our system spreads a thin layer of metal powder – with a thickness, again, comparable to a human hair – and then the laser system melting the areas of the powder that would match the desired cross section of each part or the array of parts that we’re building. And the beauty and the real system-level difference between this kind of manufacturing facility and other factories is the flexibility of production. The fact that by changing the code – and, in some cases, changing just a single line of code or the reference to the digital file that we’re printing – you can completely change the product that you’re manufacturing. So, this machine, on one day or one week might be making medical implants, but on the next day or the next week, it could be making watch housings or jet engine components. And that is a completely different way to think of resourcing production and balancing capability and resilience in supply chains. 

Sometimes there are misconceptions about 3D printing, or you could say digital manufacturing. One of them is it’s easy, you just press print. It’s not easy, it’s challenging. It takes several years, and a lot of investment, and technology, and organisational execution to bring a manufacturing process to scale. Second, sometimes you hear, “Oh, it’s 10 times faster, 100 times faster, 10 times cheaper.” That’s not necessarily the case. And it doesn’t need to be the case. Yes, we have a technology that is more scalable, can be more cost effective, is truly viable and integrated with a whole digital workflow. We always want to focus on the value that we’re creating rather than the ease of printing or the potential cost savings, because new production technologies historically only really make impact when they create a new capability. Look across history. The Gutenberg Printing Press in the 1500s, the Bessemer steel process in the late 1800s. Technologies that made entirely new categories of products or dimensions of scale possible. And I’m not comparing additive or what VulcanForms is doing to those pivotal moments, but we have to think of the new capability that technology creates to bring about real and transformative change. 

So here we see four build plates as would come out of our additive manufacturing systems. The build plate is kind of the unit of production. These are the kinds of parts we will be producing, and are producing, for customers but not the exact geometries. So right here is a plate of hip cups, which are components of orthopaedic implants. The cup of the hip implant is what would be inserted into the pelvic bone during hip replacement surgery. The intricate lattice structure on the surface of the part improves the performance of the implant and the speed at which and the strength at which it integrates with the human body. It leads to better patient outcomes. The geometry and precision of this lattice is really important to the quality and performance of the implant, and our technology is uniquely capable of achieving fine high precision lattice structures – and doing so at an industrial scale. 

Generally, we’re manufacturing very high-value components where the material, the geometry and the level of quality needed are differentiated, for consumer electronics and other luxury goods. The advantages include supply chain simplification, fewer steps and less inks needed in the supply chain to produce the finished product. Second, accelerating innovation. You can develop new products, new geometries more quickly because you can iterate through the digital manufacturing process without having to request specialised tooling, for instance. And third, exploration of new materials and new geometries. There are certain alloys that can be 3D printed that can’t be traditionally manufactured. There are certainly certain product designs, certain aesthetic looks or certain internal features that could be useful to the performance of the device. Thermal management, packing of the electronics, perhaps even RF communications, that can and I’m sure will be explored by the industry in the future. 

Vulcan is the Roman god of metallurgy. So, when Martin and I met and decided we would give this a go, at some point we said we needed a name. And we brainstormed a list of names, and VulcanForms is the one that came out. We are forming parts, we are forming metals, we are forming products, we are forming new kinds of output. Manufacturing drives our daily lives. Step back and think of all the things around you that spent some time in a factory – it’s more or less everything except the living things that are on Earth. And the advances in manufacturing have shaped the course of history and advancement of quality of life and the human condition. And that is as important today as it ever has been, especially when we’re facing the need to become more a sustainable world. And in the face of the concerns of supply chain instabilities and geopolitical tensions, we realise how manufacturing is critical to our national security, our health and our ability to explore new worlds and advance the human condition. So that’s why we’re here. That’s why VulcanForms exists: to move manufacturing forward and be a small piece, hopefully a very important piece, of that future.

VulcanForms’ innovative manufacturing process allows clients to drive innovation by easily changing and testing different designs.  One of the tools to help them do this is PTC’s 3D CAD software Creo. Time to meet our expert, Brian Thompson, who can tell us more.

Brian, the Creo Simulation Live module once again features here, it played an important role in expediting the development of VulcanForms next-generation printer. The ability to perform simulations in real-time was an important element to that, can you give our listeners a high-level overview of what that means, and how Creo enables it?

We want design engineers to be able to accomplish those simulation tasks as part of their design process. So that the simulation experts at VulcanForms can focus on the more complex multi physics, even highly non-linear problems that are going to be relevant in developing a piece of added manufacturing equipment like VulcanForms is developed here. Creo simulation live is really, really well suited. To the task of providing in process design guidance. It’s actually quite robust simulation, but more focused on individual physics like structural simulation or thermal simulation or modal simulation that is a lot more intuitive and relevant for the design engineer. Creo Simulation Live gives the design engineer the type of tool that they can use right there as part of the design process. 

It’s practically instantaneous because it works on the graphics card and uses a brand-new technology developed by our partners at ANSYS. And it is really, really well suited to in process design simulations that, design engineers can accomplish without putting an overload on the simulation team at a company like VulcanForm. So, we’re excited to see VulcanForm take advantage of CREO Simulation Live in this way. It’s exactly what we intended for Creo Simulation Live. And frankly, it’s exactly why this real-time simulation technology inside Creo has been a strong driver for a lot of interest from our customer base over the last several years.