Everything Connected 22 - AM before pm
Numorpho Cybernetic Systems (NUMO)
Building smart, connected and sustainable products and solutions for tomorrow
PROLOG?– Additive Manufacturing (AM) is quickly becoming the tour-de-force in our industrial progression. Utilizing 3D printing and other state of the art technologies, we are not only enabling smart manufacturing, but also providing for customized products at scale. Utilizing it and other technologies like AI/ML, Blockchain, IoT, and AR/VR and other Mixed and Hybrid reality techniques, we are harmonizing the bind between the different silos of the product lifecycle – business processes, innovation, production, and marketing and sell.
This article summarizes our experiences starting with 3D printing and expanding on to other aspects of Adaptive Engineering leading up to Additive and Smart Manufacturing to build the basis for?Design for Manufacturability (DFM), Design for Assembly (DFA) and their combination DFMA (Design for Manufacturing and Assembly) techniques.
This is a supplement to showcase artifacts for Imagine, Design, and Create using?MANTHAN, Numorpho Cybernetic Systems (NUMO) advent into building a design philosophy for innovation in Industry 5.0 that accounts for intense ideation, smart engineering and human-centricity as key core concepts in building solutions, products and services of the future.?This is appropriate as we progress thru our industrial revolutions from Industry 4.0 (smart manufacturing) to Industry 5.0 (human-centric solutions).
AM before pm (the day ends) is an introduction to the world of new engineering called hardtech utilizing CAD, Simulations and 3D printing in conjunction with other technologies for making. The core of the article is how making products is morphing to a “born philosophy” vs a build culture. In this new world customers, creators, products, and materials are conjoint in the creation of the solution.
In a themed curriculum, Drexel University partnered with MxD, the design for manufacturing institute to instill tenets of Additive Manufacturing via a DoD mandate to empower the workforce in smart manufacturing. Called D3-AMP, the Drexel Digital Design & Advanced Manufacturing Program is composed of three interconnected modules to accommodate participants with varying levels of experience:
The overall objective of the D3-AMP program is to take the participant on a tailorable/comprehensive digital design and continuing education curriculum which includes all stages from conceptualization to final product manufacturing which is devised to be inclusive of both collaborative and personalized experiences.
I have appropriately divided the sections in this post into Morning, Afternoon and Evening culminating in a treatise on customization – what I call Custom Manufactory. Subsequent sections are for the phases after the product signoff in terms of maintenance, service, support, and eventual sunset, and how it even could be the basis for our exploration into space.
The goal of this post is to briefly discuss the history of making and our experiences working with 3D printing on everything from simple single parts to complex designs in a wide range of materials and composites.?We will briefly touch but not detail the theory of?Digital Engineering?(CAD, Parametric Modeling, Generative Design and Engineering Simulations) for material properties, their usage, and mechanical and electronic component design. These topics will be summarized in future articles.
BORN NOT BUILT
More than a century ago, Henry Ford installed the first simple moving assembly line in a Model T plant to herald what we now call Industry 2.0, and the world of automobile manufacturing was forever transformed. Just as the assembly line opened new doors for a then-nascent industry then, the rise of additive manufacturing creates new opportunities at every phase of the automotive manufacturing life cycle – from functional prototyping to mid- and high-volume production to aftermarket and spare parts today. And many of those opportunities relate to production speed and part complexity – or a combination of the two.
Traditional manufacturing methods are built and are subtractive in nature. They are based on forming a desired shape for a block or by defining casts/dies for specific geometries. They cannot account for complex shapes and internal geometries.?Economics?dictate?that?the cost of?changing?a product?in what is called subtractive processes is?10?times?more than?the cost of?designing?it.
Additive Manufacturing (AM)?on the other hand can account for complexities in geometries because of its ability to create geometries and designs that cannot be created using conventional subtractive manufacturing methods. It has emerged as a powerful tool in recent years and is opening up entire new industries. With AM, designers can create new types of components that were never possible before. A recent survey of 1,900 3D companies found that 52% are using 3D printing to manufacture products, not just prototypes, according to Sculpteo, a 3D-printing subsidiary of German chemical giant BASF. Top uses for 3D printing are making complex shapes and “mass customization,” the ability to manufacture products that are digitally fine tuned for individuals.
However, the emergence of this new technology has imposed new challenges on the engineer, particularly with regard to the behavior of the materials used in manufacturing additively manufactured parts where both the part and the material are composed simultaneously. The biggest challenges for additive manufacturing, are:
the survey found. 3D printers won new attention during the coronavirus pandemic, when companies and households found them useful to produce personal protective equipment like face shields.
A brief review of our 3D printing experiences includes the development of the concept for an adaptive manufacturing system that can be used to manufacture new designs. This adaptive manufacturing system could be used to make unique and customized designs as needed. We will call this Adaptive Engineering for custom manufactory.
AM IN THE MORNING – IMAGINE, DESIGN, CREATE: THE FUTURE OF MAKING
We live in a world that somebody imagined, designed and created. Humans’ remarkable ability to form mental patterns about how the world might be is truly one of our species’ most astonishing abilities.
We normally examine design in artificially small silos called invention or design or artistic imagination. But they are inextricably connected?– Imagine, Design, Create from Autodesk
The challenges of designing innovative products are to balance power, speed, weight, accuracy, strength, and cost.?
AM reduces product development lead times and provides geometric freedom, part consolidation, and design individuality.?AM allows you to build physical objects in the same exact way as computers build programs: You can custom design almost anything with an easy to use programming language, and that design is then printed out using innovative new systems. We are harnessing the power of exponential technologies to provide the tools needed for this exciting new era in software driven hardware manufacturing.?By building products layer by layer, it’s possible to construct designs that would be impossible with conventional casting, molding, extrusion or machining. Although 3D printing got its commercial start creating prototypes, the technique is increasingly being used for production.
AM FOR THE AFTERNOON – SOME ASSEMBLY REQUIRED
Effective collaboration between Engineering and Manufacturing is a critical step to remaining competitive in the era of Industry 4.0 and IoT, and its Human/Customer Centric evolution to Industry 5.0. At its simplest, the manufacturing process involves fabricating parts, assembling final products, performing inspection and quality testing. The Design for Manufacturing (DFM) and Design for Assembly (DFA) techniques are two different classifications. DFM techniques are focused on individual parts and components with a goal of reducing or eliminating expensive, complex or unnecessary features which would make them difficult to manufacture. DFA techniques focus on reduction and standardization of parts, sub-assemblies and assemblies.
Design for Manufacturability (DFM) –?Selecting the right additive manufacturing machine is vital to achieving the desired quality and lead time. However, the part is only as good as the design. A typical design process involves defining the design space, fixing the boundary conditions, applying loads, defining manufacturing constraints, running topology optimization, and analyzing the optimized design to match the desired performance. AM involves numerous and complex variables to be monitored and controlled in the process to achieve an acceptable level of accuracy in printing.?Trial and error methods for finding the correct lattice positions or design of appropriate support structures are essential to developing the right solution. Also appropriate post-processing to remove supports, clean up of the product and other detailing is also needed to achieve good results.
Design for Assembly (DFA)?– A scalable, comprehensive BOM strategy enabled by the right PLM system is essential since the eventual solution would be an assemblage of multiple AM products.
Design for Manufacturing and Assembly (DFMA)?– DFMA is a break from tradition. With DFMA, the Design and Manufacturing Engineers work together as a team in developing the product’s manufacturing and assembly methods simultaneously with the design.?Conventionally, the design engineer designs the product then hands the drawings to manufacturing who then determine the manufacturing and assembly processes. Many engineers automatically separate the two into DFM and DFA since they have been defined separately for several years. For effective application of DFMA the two activities must work in unison to gain the greatest benefit.
Modular Product Design –?Modular design is becoming more prevalent in many industries. It has various advantages for the manufacturer, the dealer and the customers. Some of the advantages to modular design are listed below:
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AM IN THE EVENING – CUSTOM MANUFACTORY
The intention of customization is to produce the part to the specifications set by the customer and provided by the design and engineering team.?Custom Manufactory?is the process of designing, engineering, and producing goods based on a customer’s unique specifications, including build to order (BTO) parts, one-offs, short production runs, as well mass customization. The product will thus be produced and delivered faster than traditional manufacturing and will be able to overcome many of the challenges of field repair. The part will be fully qualified and ready to use upon delivery.
One of the most promising trends is mass customization, which combines the flexibility of custom-made products with the low unit costs achieved in mass production. Customized products can offer tangible benefits and create higher value perception for customers while providing higher margins than mass production for the manufacturers. By reducing the time it takes a product to get from concept to the customer, additive manufacturing will also enable companies to become more agile in manufacturing and respond faster to trends and changes in customer needs.
With Additive Manufacturing, a company can have a near-zero inventory because it can print parts when a customer orders a product. This lowers the cost of inventory and the risk of carrying a large inventory in a warehouse or in a production facility. For fast-paced industries such as aerospace, this will enable a much faster design-to-production cycle.
AM AFTER HOURS – SUPPORT, MAINTENANCE AND SERVICE
With the advent of Cyber-Physical Systems, IoT and Predictive analytics, it is important to understand how Additive Manufacturing can facilitate the proper functioning of equipment in a shop floor. There is currently no widely adopted standardized process for rapidly and repeatedly deploying predictive maintenance solutions in manufacturing
Utilizing data driven methods, statistical process control (SPC) and predictive analytics we have created a blueprint for enabling preventative maintenance using our Digital Twine Reference architecture that would utilize engineering toolsets and MES systems to quickly troubleshoot and diagnose faults and runaway conditions so that appropriate actions can be taken to remedy situations. This would enable proactive management of shop floors, and assembly lines to reduce downtime and churn to optimize mid-stream manufacturing processes. The figure below depicts Use Case 15 for Predictive Maintenance for Manufacturing:
MATERIALIZING SPACE
Use of metal AM in aerospace is poised to grow throughout the coming decades. The design freedom and opportunities for lighter, stronger, and more fuel-efficient components easily offset the obstacles. Furthermore, 3D-part printing will become more efficient and also be enabled in space where the logistics of transport could be surmounted by printing parts on site rather than wait for the next payload to arrive.
Qualifying parts for aerospace takes a special significance when parts are 3D-printed. Metals and polymers used to make 3D-printed components are essentially forged on the fly, so there may be questions about material integrity that must be answered comprehensively and scientifically. Especially with flight-critical parts, the technology used to accomplish this task is computed tomography, better known as CT scanning.
A decades-old technology, CT scanning is a viable way to peer into and through a workpiece to uncover any hidden internal flaws. CT scanning also allows additive manufacturing (AM) users to verify that their equipment is functioning properly and that their processes are sound and repeatable – able to produce the same metallurgical and mechanical characteristics on the parts 3D printed today and a year from now.
Metal printing is favored by many engineers tasked with making space-based components such as metal parts for rockets. Because rocket engines need to be able to withstand very high temperatures, an Inconel copper super-alloy powder is often chosen. Inconel is a distinctive class of super-alloys that are recognized for their corrosion and oxidation resistance.
Instead of incorporating plastic into the metal filament, printing for space-based applications is better suited to Direct Metal Laser Sintering. To produce dense rocket parts, loose metal powder is laid in layers. Between each layer being placed, a laser is pointed onto the metal powder. The laser traces the precise shape dictated by the digital file, melting and binding the metal in the process. This is repeated for each layer, until the solid metal shape is submerged in the excess metal powder.
Soon, metal 3D printing could take place in space to create tools, instead of sending equipment by rocket. This would lower the time taken to receive replacement parts for repairs as well as the cost of flying them from Earth to the International Space Station (ISS). NASA is currently funding research into metal 3D printing in low gravity. Depending on the success of space-based manufacturing, the future could include printing a base on the moon. The James Web Space Telescope (JWST) and Project Artemis to enable occupation on moon and Mars are just two recent examples that have and will utilize materializing space.?
SUMMARY
Additive Manufacturing is just getting started, and its applications are endless. With the right tools and training, manufacturers can achieve their targets through AM. Product designers are already using 3D printing to create prototypes, test the market, and refine final designs. It is already changing the way products are designed and made. The emergence of Additive Manufacturing will have a significant impact on supply chains. AM will enable manufacturers to shorten supply chains and deliver products that cannot be manufactured using traditional processes.
Additive Manufacturing enables faster, more agile product development. By leveraging AM, companies can create and test prototypes internally, rather than relying on outside companies. It also enables companies to tap into flexible, low-cost production. By leveraging AM, companies can create on-demand production, where products are produced only as they are needed. Companies can produce a variety of different products, in small batches with no need for retooling, allowing them to meet changing market trends. By leveraging AM, companies can create on-demand production, where products are produced only as they are needed. Companies can produce a variety of different products, in small batches with no need for retooling, allowing them to meet changing market trends. Additive manufacturing equipment manufacturers continue to deliver machines that are faster, more accurate, and simpler to use, while CT scanning providers and software firms are keeping pace by developing complementary systems.
Utilizing Additive Manufacturing for Industry 5.0, technology, process and product ecosystems are interdependent, interlinked and work together. The technology ecosystem creates the foundation for the manufacturing ecosystem. The manufacturing ecosystem creates the foundation for the human-centric product ecosystem. The human-centric product ecosystem fuses with the environment to create a sustainable ecosystem.?
In subsequent articles, we will also explain automated techniques for creating variations as well as some additional methods for creating permutations.?We will also summarize knowledge learned from 3D printing, CNC machining, sheet metal and plastic forming, mold making and casting, injection molding and fiber reinforced composites. We will then provide an overview of some advanced technologies such as?Integrated Machine Tools (IMTs),?Smart Manufacturing Systems (SMSs)?including?Small Factory Engineering (SFE)?and flexible self-replicating manufacturing systems.
The two paragraphs below is OpenAI 's unedited summation of this article using the DaVinci GPT-3 engine. It is amazing the way it has captured the essence of the post and the insights that it has gathered:
What if you could design just about anything, in any shape or size? What if you never had to wait for something to be built, or saved for something that you couldn’t afford? Numorpho Cybernetic Systems (NUMO) can help make these dreams a reality. Using additive manufacturing (3D printing) allows us to build functional and strong parts out of high-strength materials such as titanium, stainless steel, and aluminum, with no assembly necessary. We are able to print new products that haven’t been available on the market before. Our technology has applications for manufacturing, automotive, aerospace and defense, heavy equipment, medical devices...
NUMO is in the business of defining an intelligent platform for designing and building cybernetic products. Unlike traditional CAD/CAM tools, NUMO’s advanced design system enables you to theme any product you can think of – no matter how complex – without having to worry about the tool limitations.?With NUMO’s additive manufacturing technologies, you can create parts that are immeasurably more complex than any previously possible. With our Cybernetic Systems you can regain control of your most important industries from the lowest to highest levels. Additive manufacturing is a form of industrial magic, bringing products into existence with the press of a button. Our Cybernetic Systems allow your factory floor to be an artistic laboratory – a means for artistic expression in the same way that a musician or an architect finds it in a guitar or a flying buttress.
Founded in Chicago, IL in 2021, NUMO is a company whose vision is to utilize intelligent techniques to build smart, connected, and sustainable products by pushing the edges of engineering, technology, data management, AI, and cybernetics. We will be creating new Ideation techniques, enabling Industry 4.0 (for smart connectivity and robotic automation), and adding to it the Industry 5.0 (human-centric and sustainable products) framework for development, build and commercialization.
REFERENCES
For more information, please contact:
NI+IN UCHIL, Founder & CEO
Nitin is a Strategic Thinker, Product Engineer, Enterprise Architect, Technical Evangelist and Digital Transformer with 20+ years of experience in advanced technologies (aerospace & defense), product lifecycle management and knowledge-based engineering (automotive), business process redesign (manufacturing, telecom, compliance), ecommerce, analytics, data mining, front-end experience-driven design and digital architecture (retail, CPG, high-tech electronics, finance, insurance, food, media & entertainment and hospitality). More recently he has been creating a framework to enable the articulation of Big Data and Analytics using a themed, pragmatic and structured methodology.
Currently as founder, CEO and Technical Evangelist at Numorpho Cybernetic Systems, he is involved in theming the meld between the Physical and the Digital Realms and formulating the architecture for Industry 4.0, Industry 5.0 and creating smart and connected products and services.
Nitin has founded several successful companies, in past lives worked as a Principal Director in a large Consulting Company and in the Aerospace and Automotive domains. He holds a Master’s Degree from the University of Oklahoma and a Bachelor’s Degree in Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Varanasi.?