“I just want 3D printing technology to be more damn reliable.”
In the fifth instalment of TCT Magazine’s Additive Insight Innovators on Innovators podcast series, Candice Majewski [CM], Senior Lecturer in Mechanical Engineering at The University of Sheffield sits down with Alex Kingsbury [AK], an Additive Manufacturing (AM) Industry Fellow at RMIT University.
Though Candice and Alex have built up a strong friendship via social media, the pair have never physically met in person and this Innovators on Innovators is only their second time speaking via video call. They carry out their work - some of which is divulged below - on opposite sides of the world, focusing on different processes, but see things in much the same way.
Across a near hour-long chat, Candice and Alex discuss their respective entires into the 3D printing space, the importance of standards to enable academics and industrialists to communicate, the impact of COVID-19 on how AM is perceived, and their wishes for the industry's future.
Below, we have the full transcript of the pair's exchange.
CM: Alex, thank you very very much for agreeing to do this. I know we've not met in person, we've spoken a bit on Twitter, which is an interesting way of getting to know people now. But yeah, I thought we have different backgrounds, different experience and everything. So I thought it might be nice to just have a chat about where we've come from, what we're doing, what the industry is doing these days.
AK: Most definitely, thank you so much. I mean, this was your idea. And it was such a good one, which was the Innovators on Innovators podcast series, and we were supposed to choose someone from outside of the TCT Advisory Board. But in fact, we're both on the Advisory Board. You know what, I would have chosen you, but we weren't allowed to. But then you asked if we could bend the rules, which is always, I feel, a good principle to take in life.
CM: [Laughs] Yeah, it’s always a good start.
AK: Yeah, I’m really pleased to be here.
CM: I know, obviously, a bit about your background and everything, but I think the thing that I don't really know is how did you come to be in additive in the first place? Because I think you're from a different background in the first place and then you kind of came into the field, but what was your route into it?
AK: Yeah, so I'm an engineer by training. I did chemical engineering and I worked in industry for a little bit doing sort of more mining and oil and gas type consulting work. And after a little while doing that I moved to CSIRO, which is, probably the best way to describe what CSIRO does, if anyone isn't aware, is it's kind of like a Fraunhofer type thing for Australia research institute, or the National Labs system in the US. So it's our equivalent here in Australia. And the idea is that it's very much industrial research that's focused on delivering value to the Australian economy. And when I joined, I got to work in the titanium programme, which we had a really big effort in because titanium is something that we have a lot of natural resources in, in Australia. But we ship it off at very, very cheap rates in a mined form, but we don't really extract any value out of the titanium supply chain.
So, what we were doing was working on projects that delivered more value to Australia by extracting value out of that titanium supply chain, so thinking about how can we make titanium metal differently so that it's cheaper, lower cost, easier because titanium, by the way, is a pain to work with. And then once we have it in that in a titanium form, how then do we go and do our downstream processes, whether it's rolling it, cold spraying it or 3D printing it! And so that's really how I got into 3D printing. We got our first 3D printer about a year after I joined so I really was able to be there from the beginning of CSIRO getting into 3D printing and then really saw that through and I followed my career through the progression, I feel like, of 3D printing and our experience of 3D printing with titanium specifically, but we moved into other metals and then we got other printers, and it really grew a lot and in a in a lot of ways our experience of 3D printing at CSIRO and mine was that the interest in it grew along with the public interest in it as well so we had this enormous public interest in it. But, Candice, you started in additive manufacturing, though, like a long time ago.
CM: Let’s not say a long time ago [laughs].
AK: [Laughs] I feel like such an old timer saying, 'yeah, it was 2011,' right? And I feel actually very lucky and privileged that I can say that I had that experience, but when was it that you first got into 3D printing?
CM: So, I started about 20 years ago now. And it's interesting you say that, because when I started, there were definitely this group of old school people who'd been in it from the beginning. And I remember sitting there and thinking like, 'my word..'
AK: Like, the early 90s?
CM: Yeah, and I remember being really almost kind of envious of those people and saying, like, 'how great would it have been to have been there at the beginning?' But then I think we keep seeing, maybe every 10/ 20 years, this kind of resurgence of new stuff that happens. And now I'm not like the oldest school person, but there was this kind of new [generation] getting into it.
It's interesting what you say about the titanium though, because - and a lot of my work is in materials will be on the polymer side - we spend a lot of time saying 'we've got these processes, which materials can we put in them? What can we do something interesting with?' So, I think it's really interesting hearing from that background of, 'okay, we've got this material, what can we do with it?' And then one of those things is 3D printing, because that's kind of very opposite from the way that I've been used to having those conversations, it's more often we don't have a huge amount of materials currently for the processes that we work on, so the powdered polymer processes, and often it is very much looking for those materials that will work in it. Rather than that kind of other way around, if we've got this material, what can we do with it? So I quite like that as an approach, and it makes perfect sense. We've got loads of it, we don't do as much with it as we could do. But I think for me, the interesting thing with additive has always been, there are just so many possibilities for it.
AK: What, you’re not saying it’s a solution trying to find a problem are you? [Laughs]
CM: Sometimes, maybe. And I think there's a lot for us to do to perhaps, educate people, which I know you spend a lot of time working with industry as well. But there does sometimes seem to be this attitude of 'we know 3D printing's great, we need to be doing something with it.' And actually sometimes starting with 'well, what problem are you trying to fix with this?' And I think it was very clear when it first came out it was 'we want to do prototyping and we know that prototyping can be costly, we know it can take a long time, we know we're not doing things as efficiently as we could, here's a great way that we can do that.' And so I think early on, there was this real need for it and a real push for it in certain areas.
Now we've almost got to the stage where lots of companies are saying, 'well, we need to be using this because other people are using it.' Without perhaps that thought behind it of, 'well, what do we actually need to work on? What do we need to use it for? What are the bits of our business that it would be good for?' Because it's rarely going to be useful to everything that you do. And so I kind of enjoy that side of it actually, sometimes talking with industry and saying, 'well, the first thing you need to do is figure out where you would use this, where you've got areas that it could add value to what you're doing,' and then kind of take it from there. And I think perhaps from there, there's a natural progression of 'well, then these are the processes we should be considering, these are the types of materials, this is how you would implement it.' But starting with that 'what problem we need to solve' is probably a quite important part of the process.
AK: Yeah, and I've found that the conversations - I mean, obviously, as you would expect - have matured a lot over the years. So initially, the lab that I worked in at CSIRO got a lot of foot traffic, right? We got so many people that were just interested in what we were doing. And often you'd have visitors that were coming to another part of CSIRO and their hosts would say, 'oh, would you like to see our 3D printing lab?' And they'd be like, 'oh, what's that?' Because we did do a great job of really showcasing the technology and the parts we were making and stuff. And so we got a lot of traffic coming through our lab and I remember the questions went from 'what is 3D printing because I don't even know, tell me about it.' And then it went to 'wow, you can 3D print with metal. Really!? I thought it was just plastics.' And then it went to 'oh I hear it's a rapid prototyping tool.' And that was really very much at the stage when we were saying 'no, no, no, we're using this in end use applications, these are parts for serial production now.'
So definitely, the conversations matured really in line with the industry, but always with a lag. It's funny on the material side, right? Because I always found that as researches and I mean, researchers love material science, right? [Laughs] It's always such a ripe area for research, and so easy to get excited about new materials. But when you're working with industry, it's just like, 'No, no, you're not changing the material,' and it's really a philosophy, an approach to AM that I really understand and appreciate where they're coming from when they say that. But to the point where it's kind of like, 'well, I use aluminium for this application, so I only want to use aluminium for this 3D printed product.' And you're like, 'but it's a completely different alloy of aluminium. Like, they're very different properties like are you sure?' 'No, no, no, no, aluminium, aluminium is what we use, so that's what we're using.' And I'm kind of like, 'I feel like this is not really thinking things through properly.' So, I find sometimes that there is very much a disconnect between how excited we get as researchers around material science and the possibility with materials and new materials and what can we do with this? How does this respond in a 3D printing process? Versus the conversations happening in industry which is, 'we are de risking, we're going to make this acceptable to a board, we need to be able to pitch this to our customer, don't you even dream of changing the material on us.' It’s like, ‘I am actually changing materials. It’s like ‘no, no, no different alloy, doesn’t matter, no issues [laughs].’
CM: Yeah, and I think we see it quite a lot throughout all the areas of it, we see the same in academia, actually, sometimes it is just the language you're using. But it's also the motivation. And I think the thing I've noticed with industry in particular is, you're quite often talking to someone on a technical level who gets all the nuances and understands all of those different things. But actually, especially in a big company, they're having to kind of pitch that up the chain, and up the chain, and up the chain. And so you end up with them convincing the person above them, and then that person trying to convince further upwards.
So I think it's interesting that you get that difference between what we understand from the technical side is perhaps the most exciting, but that person at the top of the chain, who has to sign off the money for it, what's going to get them and this idea of risk, I think, is really important, because we don't always know exactly how things are going to behave. For our processes, we have a really good idea of what's going to happen when we take the parts out the machine, we can test them, this is how that parts going to behave. But I think another one of the things there as well is this idea of long term behaviour of parts. So out of the machine, it's going to be more or less exactly the properties that you're hoping for. But are those properties still going to be there in whatever the lifetime of your product is? And that's something else that we encounter quite a bit with industry is 'well the risk to us is not just that we're changing the process and possibly the material, but it's also what if that material or that part doesn't continue to perform over the timescales we need it to?' And so I think there's quite a bit of work there as well in if we want to be convincing people to use it is to not just be looking at that really short term bit of it, but looking at what performance do you need out of this? And over what timescale? Are you looking for something that's going to last ten years, and it's going to perform the same? Is it a very kind of quick turnover part? Is it like a mobile phone where it needs to behave a certain way, but actually, you're always trying to up-sell and get people to upgrade and kind of get the next thing and then the next thing and it's those kinds of timescales that I think are important as well is can we guarantee that this will work for you over for the time you need it to?
AK: Yeah, I mean like fatigue life is just such a harder nut to crack, right? And also just in terms of projects that manage or investigate fatigue life, they're more expensive, they require more testing, they require so much more validation, like tensile tests are so easy [laughs]. We love a good tensile bar, everyone loves tensile bar, but it is, to be fair, a pretty first pass kind of look at mechanical properties.
CM: Yeah if you don’t get past that…
AK: Yeah, exactly [laughs]. You’re right, we should be probably moving a little bit beyond the tensile bars, like we still need to do the tensile bars.
CM: Yeah, let’s not scrap the tensile bars [laughs]. But I think the other thing is interesting. So I spoke to someone years ago at a conference who had basically set up a company, which put academics and industrialists in a room together and he kind of acted as the facilitator between them. And he said, the reason for this was because he'd sat in a meeting a couple of years before, where a bunch of academics and a bunch of industrialists had all been in the room and he said, I just sat there and watched and everyone was talking at cross purposes. And it comes back to your point about the research, it's like, 'here's the really exciting research we're doing that could be useful to you.' And then the industrialists were talking about the things that were important to them and he'd managed to make an entire business out of translating what academics and industrialists were saying to each other into a way that kind of helped them meet in the middle.
AK: Wow [laughs].
CM: And it really stuck with me, because then every time I was talking to people from industry, I kind of had this guy's voice in my head saying, 'you need to be speaking the same language, and you need to be thinking about, and it comes down to in every case, I think, what's their motivation?' Like, what's their reason for wanting to try these technologies? What's the barriers to them taking it? And he said it was really interesting seeing that academics and industrialists traditionally speak very different languages. I think we're getting better at it, as we kind of get more of this crossover but it is interesting, trying to figure those things out.
AK: On the language, I wanted to ask you, so one of the things that I do is I sit on our Australian Standards Committee for Additive Manufacturing. And look, really the committee role is primarily about adopting additive manufacturing standards as Australian standards. To be honest, that's quite an easy job because I mean, we all work to the same standards, international standards, anyway. And it's just a matter of, I wouldn't quite say rubber stamping, because I certainly do read them, but yeah, for Australia, it's an opportunity to be able to sit on those international committees, and to have a seat at the table and to have a say. But getting back to my point, which is I do have to read the standards, and make sure that they're acceptable to the Australian context and give them the go ahead. And one of the standards I was reading had your name on it. You had done some work to support the development of that standard, I believe it was for measurement or something, it was quite a while ago.
CM: It was a long time ago, yes [laughs].
AK: [Laughs] But you've obviously been involved in standards development, how important do you think they are for us? 'Us' not only just research and academia and industry, but also industry to industry, country to country, market vertical to market vertical? How important do you think that is in us being able to speak the same language?
I think standardising what we're doing is a good thing. But I think even more important is standardising the way we report it.
CM: I think it's ridiculously important, honestly. So I think for years, we had this thing where, without standardisation, anyone can just say anything, right? And we get these properties and we get this and we get this. So, I think it's very important, especially from an end user perspective, to be able to look at something and say, 'you've quoted a tensile strength for 40 megapascals. So what does that actually mean?' And obviously in additive there were lots of things there about, are you quoting properties for parts built in the vertical direction, horizontally, what was your orientation because we know that has an effect? Things like what were the parameters you're using? What were your testing parameters? So I think there's the side of using the standards, but I think a lot of it comes down to reporting. And actually, if I come to that, and I look at some values, or I look at some measurement data, I need to be able to know exactly how you've done it. I think that's one of the things that was very much missing was you'd see a number but you wouldn't have any of the context behind it, of how the parts have been produced, how exactly they've been tested. And so without that kind of broad context, it's just kind of a number, and it might be a number that's somewhere near a true number, but it's not something you can pin it down to.
AK: You can’t have confidence in it though, right?
CM: Exactly. I spoke to someone once who was talking about flame retardancy. And they were saying exactly the same thing but quite often people say, 'Oh, it's flame retardant.' And it was like…
AK: What does that mean to you?
CM: Yeah, what does that mean, what standards do you use? Exactly. I spoke to someone once who was talking about flame retardancy. They were saying exactly the same thing but quite often people say, 'oh, it's flame retardant.' And it was like, well, what does that who? What standards do you use? We've been doing some work in a completely different area actually looking at antibacterial functionality for parts. And that's really interesting again, because that's a whole different world of testing. But it's the same thing of what standards are we trying to use? We found there's not a lot of standards or standard protocols for the things that we want to do. But again, it comes back to this idea of just include everything, right? So tell us everything you've done, because then we can recreate that, we can test using the same procedures.
So I think standardising what we're doing is a good thing. But I think even more important is standardising the way we report it. So at least, I send you some data and you can say, 'well, I know how she tested that, I know exactly what was done.' You can perhaps infer some other things from that and say, 'well, she said, these parts were built on the vertical direction, so possibly, if we were building them horizontally, they might be a little bit higher properties,' that kind of thing. But you can put your expertise into it as well. And say, 'actually, yes, I'm confident that this number is a good number, I can do something with those parts' or 'well, that doesn't seem to have been very robust, maybe I need to think about it,' maybe as a company, you want to then go do your own testing in your own lab, that kind of thing.
AK: Then you need to go spend your own money to go and do your own lot of testing, which essentially, at the end of the day, it's a waste of resources. And if we all were working off a common guidebook, we wouldn't have to do the rework. Also, I've seen that standards, I mean, even outside of additive, but say in the materials world, when you've got so many different standards for materials, it's essentially the same thing. But to have all these different standards means you have to keep a number of different lines, which means more inventory, so these are kind of issues where standards can actually really help address the business issues like that can make or break a business, really.
One of my bugbears about standards and speaking the same language has been the use of trade terms in additive that have - and look, there is a reason we have trade terms and they're important for many commercial reasons - but I do find that there's been this real misunderstanding about additive because of the trade terms that we've been using. So, for example, you know, laser powder bed fusion. So many people who come into learning about 3D printing will hear all of all of these different acronyms, and not know that they're actually the same thing. It's all laser powder bed fusion. And then the worst offender is the DMLS and everyone thinks it stands for sintering. And it's like, we're not doing sintering anymore [laughs]. And then it assumes that our parts are not of very high densities and things.
CM: And a lot of those names have really stuck from the very beginning, which makes sense, right? You start some stuff off, you give it a name. Actually I find sometimes it's that people think 3D printing means a very specific process as well. And so you'll talk to people and so one of my biggest bugbears actually, is everyone thinks that Polymer 3D printing is FDM or extrusion-based processes.
AK: Or material extrusion [laughs].
CM: Someone actually said to me, after giving a talk once, they came up to me at lunchtime and said, I had no idea they were polymer powder based AM processes. And they said, 'oh, I knew there were metal powder am processes and I knew there were polymer extrusion processes,' but they literally had no idea that there was anything other than those two distinctions. And again, I don't find it's the technical people I'm talking to in a company who have that, but when you sometimes speak to people slightly removed from that area, there's often a, I want to say, slight negativity about it in 'oh, we tried 3D printing, and it didn't work.' And then you try and dig into well, what 3D printing did you use?
AK: Because you bought the $200 printer down your local hardware shop and ‘3D printing doesn’t work [laughs].’
CM: Yeah. And so there's also that thing that actually I think if we were more descriptive - so I try and I don't always get it right but I always try to say something like, powder polymer additive manufacturing rather than just polymer AM or whatever it might be, just to get that point across and I feel like if I say it enough, people will start to kind of hear the words and register that there are all these different processes because I think we ended up with... Yeah if as soon as I say the words additive manufacturing or 3D printing, you have this negative impression of something you did that didn't work because you used the wrong process or in fact, because you were using the same process but 20 years ago, and things have definitely improved since then. Our processes are still not perfect. There's still lots of research to be done, but you know, it's not the same as it was 20 years ago.
AK: So tell me a little bit about the work that you do because you do really most - correct me if I'm wrong - of your work with powdered polymer processes, is that right? Every time we talk about this on Twitter, and occasionally we'll talk about plastics versus metals and every time you bring it up, and I want to just repeat that line from The Graduate to you, and I think I've possibly posted a couple of GIFs in the past, which is just like, 'one word: plastics [laughs].'
CM: Well, I'd say now is probably a good time to make a small confession, which is my first experience of additive manufacturing was actually on direct metal laser sintering.
AK: Sinter based processes, right?
CM: And then somehow, I just ended up working on the polymer side. And obviously, we joke about it, but you know, there's clearly a purpose for all the different types of process, I think. So a lot of the work we do with polymer processes is, I guess, two things. So one is trying to really understand what's going on in the process and we have a relatively good idea of what the things are that influence our process, but we have a lot less good idea of exact parameters that we need, how our material characteristics interact with each other to make a 'good' polymer or a 'bad' polymer. And so we're doing quite a lot of work trying to really understand different materials, how they behave, but what's driving that behaviour.
Then on a related side, but closer to industry, we're doing a lot of work with companies who some of them have been involved in additive for quite a while, some of them, I think, have just started to wake up to the idea that additive is a potentially big area to them. And what's interesting when you work with those companies is they have no idea of the nuances of the additive processes. So they're kind of starting as complete beginners, often in that side, and they will tell us everything we need to know about how the processes work, and that kind of thing. But then on the flip side, they know everything there is to know about their polymers. And so you can have these really good conversations where you say, 'if this powder, or if this polymer, was slightly more like this, that that would be really good.' And they're very able to sit there and say, 'well, actually, we could do that really easily. Like, that's just a tiny change of one parameter on our reactor gives us what you want.' Or they're able to say, 'well, actually, you're basically asking us to start again from scratch and develop that material differently.' And so that's something that I think brings great value to us actually is working with those companies and starting to understand what's kind of an easy fix, and what's not an easy fix. And it's very easy as academics, I think, to say, 'oh, well, all we need to do is just have a material that does this,' and so that interaction, and our understanding of the processes, and these companies' understanding of their materials, goes really well together. And when you hit that sweet spot of, 'ah, so something we think would help improve this material is something you can really easily do.' I think that's when you have the great opportunities to develop things. There can be use in working separately on those things, but I'm a big believer actually, that where you bring together those two sides. And whether it's academia and industry, whether it's additive academia with other fields from outside of that, but still in academia, there's a lot of value to be brought there.
So we have a collaboration at the moment with some of our statistics folks, looking at bringing some of their statistical methods to understanding our materials. And actually, that comes back to the language thing as well. They talk quite a different language in terms of very specific things. So, you might get a question from them of, 'were those tests taken from the same sample of powder?' And what I mean by the same sample of powder is what I took a bag of powder out of the big box that we'd ordered, so it's all from the same batch. And what the statistics folks are saying, well, is it the exact same particles of powder that you tested? So, even then there's that kind of getting to the bottom of the language. But I think these collaborations with different people who weren't, perhaps, traditionally part of the additive area is a really interesting thing. It's a really good development. And I think we need to keep bringing in anyone from any field. Let's bring them into the fold and see what they can bring and see what perspectives they have. And so I think the more we keep doing that, probably the better the industry is going to evolve.
AK: That just goes to the heart of that cross disciplinary teams, right, and having lots of different perspectives on the table. You're just going to get better results. It's been really interesting for me because I'm working back at RMIT which is actually where I studied initially for my undergrad and did chemical engineering. And so some of the really cool projects that we've got going are actually with our chemical engineering colleagues from a different school. And it actually brings a really great applications focus to our team, working with them on a lot of different chemical engineering type applications, which has been been hugely beneficial.
And I think that when you're bringing in... I mean, another area as well is machine learning, which has been actually like, quite the buzzword in general, but also a pretty big buzzword within the AM community. But in so many ways, it just makes sense to be able to bring machine learning into AM. And as part of that - like, I mean, I've been only peripherally involved in some machine learning projects - but it's also about us getting to know the limitations as well. If you can imagine someone coming in to a 3D printing team and being like, 'well 3D printing, you can 3D print anything, right? [laughs]' And I'm probably that annoying person about machine learning. So yeah, it's about learning what the limitations are, what's possible, and what's realistic. And then yeah, you can actually bring some really cool projects to life.
I'm interested to know, you mentioned you're working with industry a little bit. The UK has been through a pretty tumultuous time in the last two years. I mean, we all have, of course, with a global pandemic, and the supply chain disruptions that that's brought, and that's being felt across the globe, but certainly from my perspective, it seems like the UK has had that a bit more intensified through Brexit, as well. So where is additive in that conversation? Is it more relevant? Is there a keener need for it? Or is it just been overlooked in all of the chaos?
CM: I think there's been a lot of disruption, you're right, with all of this. I think additive will continue to be quite an important part of the conversation. So I think we as a country, quite early on picked up on the potential for these processes. And, you know, manufacturing is really important to our economy anyway. And in particular, I think this idea of high value manufacturing, so not just making millions of standard parts and so on. But I think we've got some good machine manufacturers, we've got some end users who are doing really good things, but I think as a country, we've always focused quite a lot on manufacturing. So, I'm not worried about the area kind of going backwards too much. And we saw lots of things with it, one of the obvious things was with the COVID pandemic, and making equipment and respirators and ventilators and masks and things like that, that I think it's actually probably highlighted to some people, perhaps, the flexibility of these processes. And I don't want to say that's a positive of a pandemic, because the pandemic itself is not a good thing, but I think it perhaps has come a bit to the fore, and perhaps to some people's attention that wouldn't have been aware of it before. What we tended to see a lot is, someone started doing something and then gradually that filters down and companies start saying, 'well, these people are using it, so we probably should be considering it.' But I think the pandemic has put it back on people's radar a bit. I don't know if you've seen the same over in Australia.
AK: One of the things that's been quite interesting has been - I mean, look, very similar experience, perhaps less acute than in the UK, bu certainly very similar experiences, supply chain disruptions and things - and look, we do have a bit of a distance issue as well, goods just need to travel a little bit further, we're more geographically removed from our trading partners. So there is some small issues there. But probably, primarily what it's caused Australia to focus on and look this this is probably also, I think, a bit political as well, because we also have these geopolitical tensions happening around the world, of which Australia loves to play a part in and so the big thing for us has been sovereign capability. That's been a really big term that's been just bandied around constantly. And so it's all about building sovereign capability. And you could probably liken it to the US and the US' mentality around, 'well, if we need to close borders tomorrow, what can we provide for for ourselves and we need to build a certain level of capability within our own borders, so that we can look after ourselves.' And that mentality has come through a lot stronger through the last two years in Australia. And there's been a bit more acceptance of the idea that we do need to be able to provide for ourselves, because, to be honest, the pandemic showed that we had these horrible gaps in our manufacturing capability, that additive came in and solved a couple of - don't mind my noisy birds in the background - those critical issues and actually did surprisingly well.
But we couldn't even manufacture masks, you know, and we have let go of a whole automotive manufacturing capability, we've slowly whittled it down over the last 15 years to the point now where it is non existent? Now, if we were still making cars, I can tell you now we would have been able to make masks, right.
CM: Yeah, exactly.
AK: Yeah, and so that's been a little bit of a reality check. I'm not one for saying that we need to be all Team Australia and all of that, but I do think that we have some issues in critical supply chains that were never looked at before, that through the pandemic have been brought to the forefront of everyone's minds, and investment in those critical supply chains is now occurring a little bit more intelligently? So yes, it's probably been a good thing. And as far as additive is concerned, I mean, we had very similar experiences, we went into making ventilators and additive helped with that, and not to mention shields, and I know that RMIT, where I worked, we did a sort of a design for a shield that was for ear, nose and throat surgeons that needed to have particular lenses that they had to be able to use with their shields, and so we could integrate that. But yeah, I think in general, it's been more of a focus on manufacturing domestic capability in general.
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CM: The supply chain thing is really interesting. So we had years ago, now, there was an explosion at the polymer factory, which really, really disrupted basically the whole supply chain for polymer powders for additive manufacturing. And I don't know how much you know about the processes but nylon 12 has been and continues to be by far the dominant polymer that we use in those processes. And it turns out that most of the supply of those polymer powders traced back to ingredients at that particular factory. And obviously, that's a really sad thing that that happened, but also it really highlighted this kind of dependence of everything. I remember speaking to a company and saying, like, do you have any powder, and we actually got the last 20 kilogramme box of powder from a particular company. And they said the people we're supplying to that 20 kilogrammes is no use to them, because they need such big volumes of stuff. So we kind of got through the back door, this 20 kilogrammes of powder, which was as far as I understand the last bit of powder they had in their factory.
AK: I’m sort of imagining a toilet roll war-esque thing over the last 20 kilogrammes of powder [laughs].
CM: Exactly but I think as you move more towards this kind of end use application. And you've got companies who are saying, well, what we actually want to be doing is making parts all day, every day, we need those machines to be running. One of the things that came up a while ago, as well as material supply was things like maintenance and how you keep things running and what happens when something goes wrong. Because if you're in a prototyping facility, maybe you can deal with some of those delays if something goes down, but if you're manufacturing decent volumes or decent volumes of parts and certain materials, or you need those machines running, you can't really say 'okay, we'll send someone out in a week and we'll have a look at it and we'll try to fix it.' So I think there was a lot to learn from other industries there who - I hate comparing to 2D printing…
AK: [Laughs] me too.
CM: - but for the sake of this conversation, one of the analogies was that if you have a company that has lots of big 2D printers, and they're constantly printing stuff, your service agreement is if that machine goes down, someone is out there now basically.
AK: I know, like within 12 hours, right? [Whispers] That doesn’t happen in 3D printing.
CM: [Laughs]. Yeah. I think there's a lot to do with that, is how can we learn from that kind of model and say, 'well, yeah, if all my production or some of my production or my production of these types of components is 3D printing, then I need that level of service as researchers, we can kind of accommodate it as smaller production or longer lead times, that's fine. But for those companies that are trying to do rapid production, you can't have that kind of model of, well, we'll send someone out when we can get someone out, kind of so you've got to have that infrastructure, you've got to have the spare parts, you've got to have all the logistics set up to to enable that machine to be fixed within, as you say, a really short period of time.
I think that's an area where the industry perhaps takes a while to catch up sometimes is yeah we can do these things, we can make this stuff, but what about all the other bits of the whole process, or the whole supply chain that don't involve the bit where you're making the stuff on the machine, but the services, the training, the maintenance, all the bits that go with it, which are not the kind of cool parts that get talked about, in the presentations and everything, but they're really important actually for the confidence, I guess, of those companies.
AK: Very much so and I have to say from my experience in this part of the world, the companies that can provide a lot of assurance around being available, service techs being readily available, they're the ones that have made the machine sales and they're the ones that made really a lot of headway in the early days, around securing a pretty loyal customer base, actually. And I understand why there wasn't the investment in our service service techs here, because there just wasn't the market initially. But there was a few companies who early on invested in service techs to be local to Australia. It's a big deal, you got to fly someone out from Germany just because you machines carked it or something. That is a painful process to have to go through. And it happened to me plenty of times, because there was number of my printers that turned up their toes or something went wrong, and that we weren't given certain levels of permission and access to be able to fix it ourselves. And I was like, 'gee here we are trying to work with industry to talk about potential use cases and stuff and I'm thinking, I don't know if I'd recommend them buy a printer tomorrow, because I can see a lot of people getting pretty cranky pretty quickly about the service situation.' I mean, I think it's come a long way since then. But yeah, in the early days it was Struggle Town for sure.
CM: That's our job isn't, though, I think to kind of be realistic about it, because you mentioned one of your bugbears. My biggest bugbear above everything is the overhyping of what the technologies can do and where they are. And it's like these processes are great. And they have such great potential for so many things. But there's also a lot of things we need to fix. And I think actually, I certainly feel a responsibility when I talk to people in industry, but also when we teach our students about it, to be really realistic and say actually, these things about it are great, these things about it are not so great, but they're really improving and they're coming along. And these other things we haven't really done much with yet. And we need to bring them up to speed but you don't want people rushing out and buying a 3D printer, and then finding that it doesn't work for what they want to do. And you don't want to encourage a company to go and get into 3D printing and then find that for whatever reason all of these other things are a big obstacle to it. And it we'd rather they come into it a few years later when those things have been fixed or on their way to being fixed or when there's a better understanding of them. Rather than just kind of get into it and kind of figure it out as you go along and you cross your fingers and hope that everything works out okay.
AK: Which actually leads me to one of my favourite questions and I always like to ask people this, and maybe it's a good way for us to finish off, I would like to know Candice, what is your favourite 3D printer?
CM: Oh, that's an awful question Alex. A few years ago, in fact, the first PhD student I co-supervised came into the office one day and went, 'what's your favourite manufacturing process?'
AK: That's too broad [laughs].
CM: Honestly, we all had such an argument about it. But it's like you don't want to make a snap decision. I’m going to have to say…
AK: What speaks to your heart, Candice?
CM: I'm going to have to go with polymer laser sintering. It's where my heart was when I came into actually doing proper research, and everything, and I think if I had to pick and get rid of everything else, that's the one I'd have to keep. Also, though, because our laser sintering machine is the machine that my wedding flowers were printed on. So if I picked anything else... And the honest answer is many of the different processes have lots of benefits. They're all good for different things.
AK: Yeah, yeah. You don’t have to be diplomatic with this answer [laughs].
CM: If you made me pick one, though, I'd keep the laser sintering machine.
AK: Sorry, your wedding flowers were made how?
CM: We laser sintered them. So a good friend of mine, Guy Bingham, designed them, did all the CAD for them, and then we printed them, one of our technicians printed it on our laser sintering machine. And as I think you know, I got married in the US. So then had to carry them in a cardboard box all the way on the flight to the US and then an internal flight on from there.
AK: Meanwhile, the wedding dress you were probably just shoving in the suitcase. ‘Do not touch my 3D printed flowers [Laughs].’
CM: Yeah, the wedding dress was fine. And I'd gone through this process of thinking, right, who do I know nearby? So we were getting married in Indiana, which is not too far from Louisville. And I knew that they'd got 3D printers there, and I knew people there that I was like, if I absolutely had to, I could probably phone them up and say, 'this is an additive manufacturing emergency. You need to drop everything get these flowers on. And then can you somehow get them to me?' [Laughs]. Yeah they were fine when I got there. Just every time anyone went near that box on that plane, it was kind of eyes on them. Don't touch! [laughs.]
AK: How did they go on the day?
CM: Oh, lovely. They were perfect.Yeah. I think it was one of those things where I knew they'd be fine. There was always that bit in the back of my mind of like, oh, what if I turn up and they've just been crushed by someone's suitcase or something like that?
AK: I think the bride gets to have a hissy fit about whatever they want to have a hissy fit about [laughs]. If the flowers were your one thing that you just really wanted, and you were very nervous about it, then you're allowed to guard that like a hawk. That's completely understandable.
CM: I'm going to ask you a different question, actually. So not the process one, so I'm sorry if you had a really good answer prepared for that. So I think an interesting thing to think about is what would be your one big wish for additive manufacturing? Like over the next few years? What would you what would you love to see in additive manufacturing?
AK: Oh, goodness, me. Um, well, you definitely got me stumped [laughs]. You know what, it's a real tension between really audacious, aspirational stuff versus really boring, but very important stuff.
CM: I think you could go for both.
AK: Yeah, so for the more aspirational stuff. And it's not actually a wish that would necessarily go unfulfilled. But I just love what startups do in additive, right? This has been my enduring experience of additive has been, it's always the startups that surprise you, it's always the startups that that bring real innovation to the table. And it's one of the things when I started out in additive, I really thought existing industry was going to be the real main adopter of additive because it's just another manufacturing tool, what's the big issue? So, I really thought that they would be the early adopters, but no, it was very much the startups that were very bullish around what they could do, and like I said, really brought a lot of innovation to the table. And so I just love to see all around the world, what startups are capable of doing, and bringing to the table. So as far as aspirations, I'd love to just see loads more startups coming into additive with solid ideas, obviously, not fluff. So, that would be one but then on the other hand, I'm like I said, being much more boring, but also extremely important, which is around... I just want it to be more damn reliable [laughs].
CM: [Laughs]
AK: I'm sick of printers breaking, you know? And I would like vendors to just be way more upfront about machine capabilities. And then also for those parts that are going through those qualification processes. I guess if I could have one wish it would be for that process to be somehow shortened. I think there is a number of different ideas around how we qualify faster. But I think we all know that we need to get to a point where we are not using our current qualification frameworks where we can get to a point where we look a lot more like real manufacturing, and a lot less like an experimental technology that we happen to be using for serial production.
CM: I did hear someone said years ago, and again, it really stuck with me, they were talking about the fact that we are still using printers that were basically designed for prototyping, that we've kind of tweaked and we've made them a bit faster, or a bit bigger or a bit more productive. And I think the same is probably true with the qualification side isn't it? It's like we're trying to catch up with, with those things, and I heard it put best in terms of just quality control. And it was one of the first things that I remember hearing about it, was someone saying, 'well, we're building in layers. So every time we do a layer, we have this opportunity to look at what's happening inside the part and is it 'right'?' Again, I say that in inverted comments. But you've got this ability, every single layer to say, 'is that layer correct?' And if all those layers are correct, does that mean that the whole part is correct? And I think we are seeing some really interesting technologies coming through, interesting applications of existing technologies into that area. But I tend to agree if we can speed up that process and say, actually we're getting to the point where we know that everything is as it's meant to be and that's good enough. That's a really powerful step forward, I think, for the industry in general.
AK: Yeah, definitely. And also on the post-processing side, how do we get to a point where we don't have such a heavy post processing burden? I think that would be fantastic. And obviously, that's very application specific and very industry specific as well and sometimes materials specific. But what's become so much clearer over the last probably five years, particularly as we're pushing more and more into industry has been, 'wow, post processing is a real pain and it's quite expensive.' And we're seeing some pretty cool solutions coming onto the market now, again through the startups, who know that, well, it's a pain point, so we're going to be here to solve it.
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