"We are about making strong parts"

Three years go, the words "desktop metal" were still a pipe dream, an additive manufacturing couplet yet to be successfully executed, that was until a company of that very name took the concept and put it on engineers’ desks for the first time making office-friendly metal printing a reality. The name Desktop Metal is now so entrenched in the additive manufacturing lexicon, it’s hard to believe it has existed for little more than a tenth of the lifespan of some fellow industry heavyweights.

Today, Desktop Metal’s Studio System has one of the largest install volumes in its class thanks to companies like Ford, BMW and Google who were among early adopters and investors. With a technology-driven ethos, it has transformed itself into the most funded 3D printing company in the world, amassed a global sales channel of near 90 partners, and that compact Studio System is now shipping in 48 countries to customers like John Zink Hamworthy Combustion in the U.S. and the University of She eld in the U.K. Now, the Burlington, Massachusetts-based out t is gearing up for its biggest year to date armed with new technologies and a commitment, as the company’s Co-founder and CEO Ric Fulop described, “to changing the way manufacturers and engineers do their work.”

Sitting at the opposite end of the spectrum is Desktop Metal’s large-scale Production System which underwent its first installations this year. With promises of speeds more than 100x faster than quad-laser metal printers, the machine addresses the metal additive industry’s ultimate goal; real manufacturing production. While install figures are currently under wraps, shipments are ramping up and user stories from the likes of Indo-MIM, now a full-service manufacturing partner for Desktop Metal with an aligned focus on MIM, are a strong indicator that the machine is on track to fulfil those promises.

For those application areas in between, however, two new technologies announced in the lead up to this year’s Formnext see Desktop Metal making a major play for two huge user bases so far underserved by additive manufacturing: machine shops and composites.

"We see 2020 as a year of explosive growth for Desktop Metal,” Fulop tells TCT. “From the continued expansion of our Studio System into new geographies and new verticals, to the broader installation of our mass manufacturing technology, the Production System, to the most recent addition of both the Shop System and Fiber, the bases are loaded for Desktop Metal to deliver the right 3D printing solutions needed that are designed to increase customer success and help innovators find opportunities to unleash the true potential of additive manufacturing.”

Optimised clutch plate printed with the Shop System.

The most recent addition to Desktop Metal’s ensemble is the Shop System which is aimed directly, as the name suggests, at machine and metal job shops. Equipped with a high-speed, single-pass print engine, the Shop System is said to be 10x faster than laser powder bed systems, allowing for up to 70kg of steel parts to be processed per day. Physically, it takes a similar form to the Production System with a powder station and revamped furnace sitting alongside, but with a price point starting at 150,000 USD, aims to appeal to users with unique mid-volume manufacturing requirements, from single parts to production batches.

Fulop says: “In the machine shop, if you can free up capacity and human labour, which is the constraint for growth for a machine shop, this is a really great opportunity to then be able to produce a lot of parts.”

According to Fulop, the company saw there was a gap in the market for companies that may not have the capacity to invest in million- dollar machines (“You can get a lot of CNC machine for 200K”, Fulop said). The printer offers a spot size of 16 microns per drop, 1600 dpi resolution and distribution of up to 670 million droplets per second. It also offers the smallest drop size of any single pass binder jet system, down to 1 picoliter (a trillionth of a litre) which allows for superior surface finish, and its five lines of 70,000 nozzles per line are said to provide 25 % higher redundancy compared to other systems. The accompanying furnace has also been reworked to allow for greater mass and faster sintering.

“The idea was: what can what can we give them in 3D printing that would be competitive with CNC that would enable them to have no tooling and faster productivity and better shapes?” Fulop explains. “Binder jetting, being the most efficient way of 3D printing, was the right choice to do that. We understood that one of the things CNC gives you is very good surface finish and tolerances. So, we focused on a print engine that would be very, very high resolution. This is the highest resolution print engine in the market today by at least 33% Then we focused on having the smallest drop size possible, so we could have the highest level of detail. I think there's incredible demand for it.”

Backing up that demand, Desktop Metal understands that hardware is just one part of the process which is why the company has built out a team of experts to ensure every piece of equipment has a strong backbone in materials and software. Desktop Metal’s VP, Inventor and Lead Developer of Live Parts Andy Roberts, for example, has evolved the company’s Live Parts software into a sintering simulation tool by programming sintering fundamentals into the physics engine to show how a part will react throughout the entire sintering cycle. Its Fabricate software, with built-in metallurgy expertise, also underwent an update earlier this year. Similarly, Desktop Metal’s growing materials library is a good indicator of progress with the company recently introducing 4140 chromoly steel and H13 tool steel for the Studio System, opening up applications in moulding and tooling and critical industrial components.

Desktop Metal recently threw a bit of a curveball, diversifying outside of metals for the first time with a completely different kind of additive technology in the form of a small but mighty machine known as Fiber.

“We are about making strong parts, making end-use parts and really making functional components,” says Desktop Metal Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer, Jonah Myerberg, referring to the “desktop metal” misnomer in light of its new continuous fiber desktop 3D printer. “Metal 3D printing, done the right way, accessible to everyone. Carbon fiber 3D printing, done the right way and accessible to everyone. What we heard from the industry was that the same customer who wants to print metal parts wants to print lightweight, strong composite parts as well.”

Fiber is designed to bring the same level of accessibility the company’s 160,000 USD office- oriented Studio System brought to metals, to the challenging area of composites. To get there, the company leveraged the expertise of Dr. Konstantine Fetfatsidis, a former Aurora Flight Sciences (now a Boeing company) advanced manufacturing lead and long-time user of automated fiber placement (AFP) who founded a company called Make Composites. Desktop Metal ultimately integrated it into the company’s portfolio, bringing Fetfatsidis on-board as VP of Composite Products.

“A lot of people want to use carbon fiber for smaller stuff because it's less weight, it's got these great properties, but composites, as they get smaller are actually more expensive,” Fetfatsidis says, alluding to the labour intensive multi-step process of composite part lay-up which typically prices out smaller parts. “We basically took the media that we use in traditional manufacturing and said let's put it in a printer.”

With a small footprint that’s ideal for a print farm setup, there are two Fiber models each featuring a compact build volume of 310 x 240 x 270 mm and two printheads: one to deposit continuous fiber prepreg tape, the kind that has already been used and qualified by industry for years, and the other printhead to extrude chopped fiber filament. The Fiber HT (high temperature) platform is able to process PA6 (Nylon) as well as PEEK and PEKK thermoplastics with up to 60% continuous fiber loading with <1% porosity and can produce flame retardant parts with continuous use temperatures up to 250°C. Fiber LT, meanwhile is able to produce high-strength, ESD-compliant, abrasion-resistant PA6 parts using continuous fiber with <5% porosity and chopped carbon or glass fiber-filled filaments.

CNC fixture 3D printed with Fiber.

Both machines feature a robotic tool changer architecture for future expandability. “That was the key,” Fetfatsidis says “leveraging existing material to get the properties but also making a flexible system that could be adapted,” noting the bene t of changeable print heads in opening up future material capabilities, even in metals.

Another key difference is its pricing model. Harking back to those initial goals around accessibility, Fiber is offered via a subscription service starting at 3,495 USD per year including hardware, software and services. It also means, should Desktop Metal come out with a new printer, the customer can send theirs back and get an upgrade. It’s a bit of an experiment, according to Fulop, but customers so far are keen.

“It's the portfolio, it's the ability to have a portfolio and be able to help customers grow with our technology and make them successful,” Fulop said of the company’s growing roster. “We’re excited and ready to build on that momentum with the commercial availability of our portfolio of 3D printing products and prepare for other exciting announcements in the coming months.”

Those coming months are set to be tremendously busy for the company. Both Fiber and Shop System platforms are scheduled for commercial availability in 2020 and more users are set to get their hands on the Production System, which Fulop, without giving away details, suggests could be in line for a number of updates. One thing he and Myerberg do offer however, is that Desktop Metal knows there are plenty more ways to build parts in metal, hinting that there is more to come over the next 12 months.

Myerberg concludes, confidently, “And we’re just getting started.

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