Welcome to 3d from nothing powered by Metalmite. The show where you learn all about 3d printing and additive technology. I’m your host, Tom Gendich. Metal mite is a full service machine shop that specializes in five and six axis. CNC, machining, CNC, grinding while your EDM and 3d printing. We have a 50 plus year.
History in this corporation started by my father, Michael Gendich 3. I took over as CEO in 2009, and I’m continuing the manufacturing legacy today as a third generation owner. In these programs you’ll learn. What kinds of printers are out there? What kinds of materials you can print on, who are using these printers?
What kinds of things you should be looking at printing as well as hearing from experts in the field, through interviews that we’ll be conducting as always, you can go to our website, 3d from nothing.com. You’ll find some free giveaways, learn all about what we’re doing. See the links to different things we comment about and learn more about where our name comes from, which was my father, who always said someday we’ll make parts out of nothing.
And that’s what we’re doing today with 3d printing and additive technology.
Nils Neyemer from DMG Mori Additive team:
Nils said “With hybrid machines, you have a big advantage,” said Nils Niemeyer, product manager for additive at DMG Mori USA. “You can build larger-volume parts very rapidly and finish-machine the parts on the same machine. There is less handling of the parts, smaller buffers. You get a finish-built product out of one setup. You integrate your supply chain completely into one machine.”
Using the same machine for additive and subtractive also means operators can mill the inside of the part, which isn’t possible on a separate finishing machine that can finish mill only the part exterior, Norfolk said.
“When you 3D print a part, you can always go back and mill the outside of the part on another machine but you can not mill the internal features,” he said. “Hybrid manufacturing on one machine allows you to clean up the internal features as you go.”
Today we have a special guest for you. Neil’s Neimeyer from DMG Mori additive team Neils is the manager of the sales and service of DNG Mauri additive.
It turns out in 2017, I got a chance to go to front and Germany with my wife to see the DMG Mori CTX machine that we had just purchased at that show. They had a black tarp covering up some special new technology that they were releasing all about the additive. Neil’s and I may have met one another at the show.
We were just discussing it beforehand.
So Niels, welcome to our show. Hello, Tom. Thanks for having me on the show today. Thanks for inviting me. And yeah, I’m really excited to talk with you about additive how it all started at DMG Mori about hybrid additive machines, as well as
laser powder bed machines. , absolutely. I think as we were discussing beforehand, the exciting thing DMZ Maury has been a big part of metal mite , since our inception, I believe we’ve had about 30 machining centers through the years and just absolutely loved the product and been a big fan of everything they’ve put out.
The additive side has been a little bit secretive, right? Even people who frequently use DMG Mori on the subtractive side are not even aware that there’s an entire additive team and an additive department at DMG Mori. I know you were saying that as you’ve been on board how many years now have you been with the additive side?
Yeah. Really I joined the additive side in 2017 right around the time that the powder bed product was brought into the company. And then previously I had worked with DMG Mori already 10 years ago on, also on hybrid machines. But at that time it was a hybrid machines, machining and grinding.
Yeah. So at that time we were more talking about different ways to remove metal instead of building it up and removing it at the same time. . So it seems that you’ve made your career around bundling to two options in one box. Whether it be the grinding or the additives. It seems like I like the challenge.
Yeah. Exciting. And we have talked on this show about many different kinds of printing already. We’ve talked to a couple of other specialists, but I I’ve not talked to anybody that has been able to successfully put additive and subtractive. In the same package. And so that’s something I know a DMG is doing very well.
Can you talk a little bit about the advantages and why somebody would want that? Yeah. And I really think that DMG Mori were like the pioneers in that field to commercialize that Machine concept. So the way the way it’s occurred, the way it started is that DMG Mori previously, they introduced laser applications into machining centers and then around 2012, 13, right around that time, when additive became more interesting.
In the industry it was almost natural to go from laser machining to laser deposition. Yeah. And it was a bold decision to include laser deposition, welding in machining centers. And the vision at the time was was clearly that towards larger envelopes, if you have the capability to build them up in a larger machine envelope and machine them at the same time.
So basically The capability to build up parts and provide finished machine surfaces and properties. That was the vision, the company followed in the beginning. And where this technology developed to today is simply amazing. Yeah, you can see how you’ve w we were able to bring up your brochure here that you sent me ahead of time.
Thank you for doing that. We can see for the, for those viewing on the visual part of this podcast you’ve taken multiple technologies and combined it into a package deal, right? So you not only have the laser you were saying that you have as an electron beam technology, as well as powder bed.
We focus mostly on laser together with metal powder. And that works so well because both the laser is very flexible. And the powder is flexible to apply as well. Okay. So in fact, what you can basically utilize the the laser additive tool. You can utilize it in a similar way, like a machining tool, and we can clamp a laser tool, or we can claim the additive tool in the machine spindle in the same way that we would normally clamp a turning tool or milling tool.
And so you get a very versatile platform. Now talk to me about the The health, the risk, if you will. We just we had we started with a selective laser centering machine here at metal mill and it was a powder bed machine. And when we had the doors open and that powder to metal was being handled, either being cleaned out or move, we had to work sort of a hazmat suit and a respirator to make sure that.
None of it was ingested. Now, if you’ve got this in a, as you’re talking about a tool change you literally, you bring your laser head down as you would a shell mill cutter or some other tool. How is that environment kept confined. Yeah, Tom, that’s a really good question. I think a lot of people in the industry share that same question and on the hybrid machines, the advantage here is really the powder is a little bit larger than what you would see on your selective laser melting machine.
It’s a little bit larger and therefore it falls quicker to the ground. So it typically doesn’t float in the air. But that by itself is not, that’s not a safety precaution enough. So we really care for not exposing the operator to the material at all. So if you picture your standard five-axis machining center that’s basically what we use as a.
Based machine. And after you have finished a deposition, the door remains locked for a certain period, say 30 seconds, 60 seconds. And we have additional we have an additional exhaust system on the machine and that is cleaning the entire inside of the air. So all welding gases all powder particles.
Still might float around. They get cleaned out of the air. And then since you’re using a machining center, you can simply use the coolant to clean the inside of the machine. Wow. That’s really, I didn’t think about that because we never, we don’t have coolant in our laser bed, so there’s no liquid to get the powder out of the air.
Exactly. And that’s one of the very convenient advantages of the hybrid machine. After you’re finished building the part you use your coolant to spray down the part, you spray down the powder out of the corners of the machine and the powder falls into the chip conveyor. I understand being disposed the same way metal chips.
I mentioned that I started my DMG Mori journey with grinding applications. Turns out the grinding ships are fairly similar to the particles that we use for the additive side. So we apply a special grinding package on the machine and yeah, that makes it secure and protected.
That makes sense. That’s good to know. Cause like I said, I wondered how that was handled and obviously. DMD Morris thought through that. So you, your hybrid machine is really taking these two technologies and bringing it together. So you’re getting two machines in one package. Can you talk to us about who would really see the most benefit out of this?
What kinds of industry, what kinds of products really seeing an advantage, having two in one. Yeah. We really see interest from all industries but then specifically some industries stand out right. And that can be aerospace medical automotive certainly the energy industry between oil and gas applications and turbine applications.
And And we get a lot of repair cases. Think about mold and die. For example, your molds, your for example, aluminum, die-casting the molds and the dyes. They they wear out over time. Since you can take the die clamp it inside of the machining center, you can repair it in one setup.
You can simply machine away the, where you can rebuild it, using a laser deposition, welding, and then in the end you give it a surface finish. So you have a dye that functions as, as good as a new diet, essentially. All within one setup. So that brings up a good point now in repair. So what we’ve seen traditional repair a dye company would send it out to a weld shop and they would weld up some material, come back to a machine shop to machine it back down to size and they try to use what they would just call a hard weld or some sort of harder material.
You could get into buy metal products, right? You could get into something even harder than the original substance, or have you experimented with that? Have you looked at that? Yeah. You bring up an excellent point. We started having dwell hoppers on the machine. So you have essentially two materials in the machine and you can load either one or the other material and you can even blend those.
Yeah. So you can imagine that opens up a wider range of applications. Oh yeah. And particularly, you’re right in saying that you would normally repair manually. Right now, when you weld with a five X, a CNC controlled machine, That process is much more repeatable is much more reliable.
And yeah, that’s that opens that actually improves the quality of those repaired parts quite a bit. Yeah. I believe I saw in the literature here. You’re as accurate as was at five microns when you’re using the laser tip. Yeah the repeatability of the laser tool is as accurate as the, as a machining tool.
And then certainly your surface is a little bit wavy because you have particles and a range of 50 to 150 micrometres nevertheless since we can use machining, we actually, th the finished surfaces are as accurate as machine surfaces. Yeah. So like you say, you can build up a, I found the page here talking about a little bit, it says 70% shorter material development cycle.
Again, when you think about traditionally, even five, 10 years ago, Hard welding something manual. You’re just blobbing on some material. Then you’re coming back, spending a lot of time, removing a lot of this Hardwell that you didn’t need. With this machine, you can, you could go right into the points that matter.
And then if it’s, it needs to be even tighter, you can actually even grind finish if you needed to not in this machine, but in another machine. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Very interesting. So I noticed there’s a product family. Can you talk a little bit about the product family that DMG Mori has? Yeah.
We’ve been talking about the hybrid machines now and that was the technology. We started the editor of journey with, and then a couple of years ago, 2017 when you were in front and yeah, that’s when DMG Mori added. The powder bet system. So that’s then the second part of the family and those powder machines are similar to what you would know, where you code layer of metal and a laser is then melting the powder.
So those are essentially the two technologies and they They compliment each other very well, depending on what application you have, you would either go on the larger hybrid machine or on the more complex, more filigree part about machine. Okay. And what is that? The largest envelope of the powder bed machine?
The largest thing you can print. At the moment we are looking at about a cubic foot. So 300 by 300 millimeters and then a 300 millimeter in Z. That Z height can be extended a little bit, but that is currently the envelope size focusing on, I have to. Detour for one second, as we’re talking about that front-end show in 2017 that we may have been there together.
And that was unveiled, there was a, the giant sign on the side of the factory that you and I talked about walking up unveiling it. I don’t understand. And I do have a sort of a bone to pick with upper management and France. It w if you’re working in a factory and there’s all this glass in this factory, looking out at snowcap mountains, and it looked to me about 50% of the employees rode their bicycle to work that day.
And a few of them, I think, were snowboarding during their break at the factory. I’m twenty-five miles North of Detroit. And I have to say I’m a little bit jealous of the atmosphere that they had in Bavaria. And it was to be hard to get anything done inside the factory, if you’re looking at that landscape.
Current Events:
Here are a couple articles I came across this week on the web. I find this very fascinating.
- https://3dprint.com/280097/how-the-perseverance-rover-with-3d-printed-parts-is-thriving-on-mars/
NASA’s Perseverence Rover touched down at Mars’s Jezero Crater on February 18, 2021. Since then, mission controllers have made a lot of progress, including capturing the planet’s sounds, driving on the rocky, craters of the red terrain for the first time, and transmitting over 7,000 images from the most advanced suite of cameras ever to travel to the Red Planet…
To develop the 3D printed components, NASA worked with its Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) to achieve PIXL’s lightest weight. The JPL team turned to metal AM service provider Carpenter Additive to print the instrument’s two-piece titanium shell, a mounting frame, and two support struts. Traditional manufacturing would have yielded end parts with three or four times more mass than 3D printed ones. PIXL’s lead mechanical engineer at JPL, Michael Schein, even said, “3D printing made this instrument possible” by allowing the team to achieve a low mass and high-precision pointing that could not be made with conventional fabrication. - https://3dprint.com/278670/nasa-advances-new-alloys-and-scale-of-metal-additive-manufacturing/
Additive manufacturing (AM) has enabled new and significant design and manufacturing opportunities for rocket engine components with complex internal features and thin walls. Much of additive manufacturing development has been focused on existing or monolithic alloys, which do not allow for complete optimization of the structure for the application. Recent success with Directed Energy Deposition (DED) at the NASA demonstrates promising payoffs of AM cost savings and schedule reductions along with performance optimization of weight reductions and increased margins.
NASA has shown successes using bimetallic additive manufacturing using a Laser Powder Bed Fusion (L-PBF) GRCop-84 copper-alloy liquid rocket engine combustion chamber with an AM electron beam freeform Inconel 625 structural jacket under the Low Cost Upper Stage Propulsion (LCUSP) Project. This was successfully hot fire tested in 2018 at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, and further advanced through a partnership with industry to mature bimetallic combustion chambers. Additional investigations have continued to commercialize the GRCop-84 AM and have since advanced the development and supply chain of GRCop-42. The GRCop family of copper-alloys have accumulated over 30,000 seconds of hot fire testing using a variety of propellants under multiple NASA projects, including future lunar lander concepts. The GRCop-alloys, developed at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio, are a high-strength, high-conductivity copper-chrome-niobium alloy used in a high-performance rocket combustion chamber.