Am I an Additive Manufacturing outsider yet? – An AM Perspective (Part 1)

Hard for me to believe, but it’s been a year since I decided to step away from Stratasys .?After almost eight years on the edge of my front row seat to the maturation of polymer additive for aerospace and defense, I’ve now had a year to decompress, reflect on what’s been accomplished and what remains undone (hint – there’s still a lot to do).

I started at Stratasys at an incredible moment in the company’s history.?I joined a team in 2014 that had been working behind the scenes with some of the biggest aerospace companies in the world – taking input on materials and helping qualify some niche applications.?But there was a sense that there was more to be done, and the company was making its first stabs at drawing closer to the vertical markets where they saw opportunity.?Because I had touched nearly every segment of the A&D industry in my career, I got the opportunity to be part of figuring out how we, at Stratasys, were going to take the next step within that vertical.?

What drew me in was the potential for the technology to have an out-sized impact on the A&D industry.?My first exposure to 3d printing was not positive. ?I saw a 3d printed hunk of plastic that was supposed to be a marketing asset representing a highly complex system.?It was worthless in my view.?It was a light piece of black plastic that was supposed to help convey something, I’m still not sure what, about a highly functional, and heavy piece of aluminum, nickel, and beryllium copper.?I was unimpressed.?A year later, my team was trying to figure out how to align an air data probe on a composite fuselage and a brilliant mechanical engineer came up with a very clever 3d printed alignment fixture.?Now I was impressed.?There was a spark, at least.?Shortly after that, I stepped in to help recover an engine sensor program that was massively behind schedule due to a casting procurement issue.?We ended up with printed wax investment casting patterns being driven across Minneapolis in a warm car during the dead of winter to pull 9 weeks out of a 16 week schedule.?Now I was hooked.?Looking back, while the prototyping/marketing application had its place, as a working engineer and program manager, it was the tooling applications that first demonstrated the massive potential value to me.

Over the next several years, we focused in on those impactful tooling applications, but we also, following our customers’ lead, recognized that the potential impact was even greater if we could eliminate tooling all together and print the part we needed.?This opened up a whole world of challenges to overcome.?Two that we tackled early on, and I believe were some of those most fundamental steps to advance polymer in A&D production, were meeting requirements for material traceability and stabilizing mechanical properties for repeatability – ultimately leading to standards development.

On leaving Stratasys at the end of 2021, I could see that we had succeeded in taking clear steps toward production relevance for polymer AM.?Standards, Material Specs, and Process Specs now exist for the F900.?Data on high performance materials is now available.?Some simulation tools represent some materials and processes accurately, if not universally.?Literally hundreds of thousands of FDM parts are now flying.?A few dozen just took a swing around the moon on the Artemis I Orion capsule.?All in all, this represents a good amount of progress that should be a point of pride for the industry, and more importantly a blueprint of more to come.

I had to start with history, but follow for the rest of the blog series where I'll dig into what I've learned and where I see the industry heading. - Thanks! Scott