Hybrid Technology: Constructing Components Using Additive and Composite Manufacturing

MATT THORN: So today we're going to be talking about hybrid technology, kind of combining two things that Autodesk does well-- additive and composite manufacturing. So I'm going to use you guys as Guinea pigs today. We're going to test some technology called FXP Touch. So if you'd like, and you've seen this slide before, what you want to do on your phone or tablet, you want to go to this website, the join.fxptouch.com with this code and keyword.

And what you'll be able to do is you'll be able to see the slides that I'm presenting on your phone, and be able to participate in live interaction. So you will be able to chat with everybody else, ask questions through the app, kind of pull the slides that you like, write down things, notes. You'll also be able to pull some questions that I have here in the beginning, just to kind of test the functionality out.

I have some little corny questions. So if you want to log into that site, I'll give you some time to do that and then we'll begin. So while everybody's doing that, we'll go to the first interactive slide. So I know it's an 8:00 AM class, that's pretty early. And I know probably a lot of people went to the block party last night. So if you went to block party, go ahead and select that you did. If you didn't, go ahead and select that you did not. And we'll see the results of that. Perfect.

And you should be seeing the results on your phone as well, as you live update these slides. So for the people who attended, and it looks about like 80%, went to the block party last night. How many hours of sleep did you get? I know I'm kind of in the B to C range myself. So it looks like everybody's kind of in that B to C range, which is good. So it kind of brings me to my next question. How likely are you to fall asleep during this presentation? So you can use that slide bar.

So I think this is pretty cool technology. It kind of brings us together. Autodesk is innovative, trying to bring their customers together, trying to interact more. And I know everybody likes to be on their phones, so kind of bringing the best of both worlds. The last question for now. How has your experience at AU been so far? Rate it out of one to 10.

Pretty good responses so far. I see some eights out of 10. So great, perfect. So I'll have a couple of more polling questions throughout the presentation, but really the main experience here is for you guys to interact with the presentation, ask questions, comments with each other, things like that.

So what we're going to be talking about today is, obviously, additive manufacturing for composite tooling. So we're going to talk a little bit about additive, and composites, and manufacturing processes, things that Autodesk supports today. We're going to talk about the existing problem with tooling. You know, it's a huge problem with cost, iteration, lead time, things like that. We're going to talk about potential solutions. We're going to look at what the industry is doing today. And then we're going to talk about some alternative methods for the additive tooling problem that goes past tooling.

So let's talk about additive manufacturing a little bit. So just to gauge the room a little bit, how familiar are you with additive manufacturing, are you experts, intermediates, beginners? Perfect. So we got some intermediates and beginners. So we'll go through this in some detail, so that you're aware of everything that we have here at Autodesk.

So what I want to do is kind of break this down into two types, metals and polymers. So in metal additive, we have some processes called DED, DMLS, SLM, which is direct energy deposition, which is a process that is used to kind of weld metals together to the surface. DMLS is direct metal laser central, which is a powder bed that uses a laser to kind of melt the layers of metal together. And SLM is like laser melting, which also is a powder based solution that uses a laser to melt metal powder particles together.

On the polymer side, we have DLP which is direct light processing, which kind of uses a resin curing process through a light projection, that kind of pulls the additive parts out of that resin. We have material jetting, which is a very similar process to your inkjet printers, that uses a solution to deposit material onto a surface. And we have FDM, which is fused deposition modeling, which takes some plastic solid, heats it up, melts it, and then it reforms into that plastic solid into your additive part.

What we're going to focus on today, for the purpose of this discussion, is the polymer side and mainly FDM. So why do we use additive manufacturing? It allows us to do a lot of things that we can't do with traditional manufacturing processes, like typically impossible geometries, internal lattice structures, things like that. It allows us to consolidate part geometries, allowing us to create multiple components into a single component. And also allows us to prototype and integrate faster, and create some visual aids.

Typical workflow, you design your part in your CAD tool, which then goes into your design for additive. Typically, this is where you do your topological optimization, any lattice structures, things like that. And then you plan for your post-processing of the particular part, where you do your print preparation for orientation, your tool supports, things like that. You can simulate the print process, so that you can make sure that your print will be successful in more situations than not. Then you drive the machine to print a part and do any final post-processing to remove supports or do any extra CNC operations.

So composite manufacturing. So how familiar are you with composites? Are you a beginner, intermediate, expert? We've got a little bit different mix. Some beginners as well, some intermediates, some experts. So that's great, perfect. So what are composites? Technically a composite is a material with two or more constituents that have significantly different properties.

So traditional composites, you could think of mud and straw, concrete, things like that For the purpose of this discussion, we're going to be talking about matrix material and fibers, like glass fiber, carbon fiber, things like that. And the fibers will be continuous in their state, not chopped or anything like that. So typically, composites are built from the individual lamina, and the fibers are oriented in a certain way through that lamina, so we can optimally design our laminate which is each individual lamina placed together at different orientations to get our composite design part.

And this allows us to really define our designs in a way that we can tailor the design to the structural needs and the design needs of the composite part. Composites have a very favorable strength to weight ratio. They survive very well against fatigue and are very good for thermal expansion as well. You can start to also embed things like sensors and core into the composite parts that allow you to kind of tailor unique experiences with each composite design.

A typical composite workflow, first we do our composite design in any design tool, which you have your ply design. You have your structural simulation, you kind of iterate that loop a little bit to try to optimize your composite part. And then you go into your design for process. This is where you start to consider manufacturing considerations. You start to look at how your material's going to be processed, or laid up in your molds. And try to incorporate the best scenarios for the design that you have, as well as feeding that as manufacturer constraints into your simulation model.

So you can accurately have representation of what that part's going to do in real-life stress conditions. And then from there, we kind of have two tracks here at Autodesk. We have more of a manual solution, or a hand-lamp solution-- which involves nesting, cutting, kitting, and then moving into a forming or hand-lamp process. On the other side, we have an automated solution, which is really automated fiber placement, automated tape laying.

Which in the software you create your tool path, you do your manufacturing simulation, your machine kinematic simulation. Then you post-process for that machine and drive the machine tool. And all the while, we can track the material, we can track the properties. If it's a pre-reg material, we can track the material life, tell you when it's going to expire, things like that. Tell you how much inventory you have left in your shop and when you need to take things in and out of the freezer.

And then we kind of get to the converge, again, to inspection repair. We want to make sure that the part we make is the part we designed. And then we go into final trimming process. And all the while, this is an adaptive process. Every time we make a composite part, we typically learn something about the process. And what we want to do, is we want to feed that back into the design, so we can do less iterations across our composite manufacturing workflow.

So this is typical composite hand lab process. We have the nesting, kitting, cutting process where the operators take the plys, individual plys, off the table and kit them together into the individual parts. Then they bring them over to a tool mold, and in the tool mold they place them down, typically using either laser projection or mylar templates in order to place supplies in the correct direction and orientation. And then once all the parts are laid up, they go into the autoclave, which is where they are essentially cooked at a high temperature and pressure to initiate the cure cycle of the part.

For some of the automated manufacturing methods, we have the automated fiber placement, which can be any style machine. Here you have a robotic machine laying fiber on a mandrel style set up. And on this side, we have a gantry style machine, which is laying fiber in a large scale parts. And what this allows us to do is it allows us to take the manual operations out of the composite layup process, allows us to have repeatability and scalability for high deposition, things like that, larger parts, so I can make my processes a bit more repeatable and easier to program.

There's some added design constraints here that we build into the software to help you program these machines as efficiently as possible and make sure you're getting things like fiber orientation the right way, make sure you're not getting any things like material wrinkle and things like that.

So let's talk about the problem at hand. Really, as composite manufacturers, we want to take our concepts into production as fast as possible. And how do we do that? Typically our design tools are pretty fast today. They allow us to design the composite part in a way that doesn't take very long. There's automated techniques to get that going fast as possible. But for prototyping and feedback stage is kind of where we spend a lot of time before we can get to actual production of a new design. And that's where we want to speed this up a little bit with additive manufacturing.

So typical composite tooling applications today, you have some patterning, you have your layup and repair tools, you have some consumable tools and cores, jigs and fixtures. And from there you have some more explicit tooling. But for the purpose of this discussion, we'll talk about some layup and repair tools, typically high temp, low temp tools, as well as some sacrificial tooling.

So if we look at the market today, we have high costs and long lead times for composite tooling. About 75% of the market is metal tooling. Typical materials like steel, invar, aluminum, things like that. And you build your model, which needs a mold for your layup process. And then you have your machining fixture, and then you have your part fabrication. So all these things take time, money, and if you mess something up, if the part springs back and you don't have the right machining fixture or the tool mold, have to go back, spend all this money again, and. Time and it's a very costly and long process.

Similar on the FRP tooling side, the fiber reinforced plastic, so essentially carbon fiber tooling or fiberglass tooling. You have similar problems. You have an extra step for this. You have to make a master mold for the composite tool as well. So it adds some additional work, some additional cost, even though it's a bit cheaper for this type of tooling. But the main concerns are costs, high lead times, accuracy of surface finish of my composite tools, as well as some of the material properties of the tooling.

If you look at composite manufacturing today, there is increasingly complex designs from traditional flat panels to some complicated aerospace parts. The tooling and the parts are getting more and more complex, which is posing unique problems almost in every situation. Things like cured part warpage after the part is in and out of the autoclave, figuring out the material properties of the tooling and the composite part, what temperature and pressure to set the tool at to cook it in the autoclave.

And then you also have your manufacturing concerns, what process constraints do I have, is this part even manufacturable? And then for certain trap tooling, there's not a lot of good methods today to manufacture trap tooling. A lot of times they're made in two halves, and then you have a part seam within your composite part as you bind them together.

Let's talk about the solution. So additive manufacturing allows us to iterate on our part design to get that final tool mold quickly and cost effectively in a short amount of time. I can additively print tools in hours and days instead of weeks and months waiting for my tool. It provides solutions for trap tooling and complex tooling with either washout or breakaway solutions.

Some of the materials that are used today actually stand up well to the pressures and temperatures inside of the autoclave. And it allows us to not have to do any additional steps like casting or molding or machining of the additive tooling afterwards. They're typically in their final state or close to it as we print them out.

Some of the challenges involve today in specifically additive manufacturing, you have things like part distortions and print failures that are still a problem. Creating complex and organic forms might not be exactly what you want for some standard tooling applications. Utilizing your machine throughput could be a problem if you're trying to print multiple things in the same bed or trying to get more and more iterations out quickly. And then in some cases, trying to plan some of the CNC finishing operations could be an issue.

On the additive side, so for FDM, inherently you get a poor structure from the additive process, which is not the best for the composite tooling application. So what you would need to do is you need to kind of, either through manual abrasion or some kind of sealant, is to seal the tool so that you don't have this poor structure anymore so that you can have a separation between your additive tool and your composite part.

You have also things like the coefficient of thermal expansion, which, for some of the materials that are popular today for FDM, the coefficient is fairly high compared to standard aluminum and steel and invar tooling, which means that it poses a unique problem when we put it in the autoclave. But as you'll see in some of the solutions we get to, we can actually use this as an advantage in our design and start to gain some unique situations from this property.

So we're going to look at some success stories for some additive tooling in the composite world today. I'm going to show a short. It's about about three minutes, so just bear with me. Seems like the audio is not completely working so I'm going to play it from my laptop. We'll see how that works out.

[VIDEO PLAYBACK]

- The advantage of using additive manufacturing [INAUDIBLE] is lead time, lead time, and lead time. Additive manufacturing impacts lead time in the sense that we can realize a part from design to production or fabrication of a part in one day, even. We have the need for an easy way to remove tools from parts that were potentially trapped in a mold or a complex geometry with varying parameters. And additive manufacturing allows us to have tools that can be dissolved or it can be removed.

The utilization of additive manufacturing in the context of composite fabrication begins with an idea which leads to a design in a CAD program. Once the design is complete, we have the tool pre-printed. Additive manufacturing allows us to have parts that have less seams, less post-production work. We're able to fabricate really complex geometries, and it gives us control of inner surfaces of parts that we might not have if we were using a multi-piece tool.

After the tool has been pre-printed, we got straight into tool preparation, sanding of any anomalies, perfecting the surface finish, and then applying mold sealer on the tool. And then we would go into application of the mold release. The mold release, that's applied last for part separation after the part has been cured.

The part lamination process begins with ply development. And he or she creates these patterns according to the geometries of each part. That allows the composite material to drape properly to give the right fiber orientation and to maintain it. That process is very tedious and very important.

Once the lamination is complete, we go into the vacuum bagging process, where we apply the FTP, the breather, the vacuum bag, and the vacuum sealant tape. We do our vacuum checks to verify our vacuum pack is good and that there's no leak. The full-length part is then loaded into an autoclave, and the proper recipe is then loaded. Pressure is an important parameter that allows for compaction during the curing process with these laminates. So it's vital that we have a tool that's able to withstand pressure that is 85 or 90 PSI.

The permeable triangular pattern allows the Stratasys tools to have a backup structure that will be able to withstand the pressure and the temperatures of an autoclave cure.

After the part is cured, the vacuum bagging material are then discarded, and the tool and the part is now placed into a solvent bath for the dissolving of the tool. The solvent bath allows for a more simple and less messy setup when it comes to removing sacrificial tools. After the dissolving process, you have a finished product which then can be bonded, trimmed, or drilled in the next level assembly.

[END PLAYBACK]

MATT THORN: So that's an example of a collaboration between Stratasys and Swift Engineering that they had a trapped tool, which essentially they used to build in two parts and bond them together. What they were able to do with the additive sacrificial tooling is build a structure that could stand up to the pressure and temperature for their autoclave process.

But they were able to do this trapped tooling example so that they didn't have to bond the two halves of the tool together, creating those seam lines in their composite part. They were to take the concept of this design to production in about a week. The additive tool only took about 24 hours to print. So if any design or manufacturing problems were to happen, they can iterate on that quickly, figure out the problems, and get a solution fast.

So another example of this. In this customer situation, they had a part where they had individual tools to make the kind of composite part down here. And you can kind of see there's a webbing structure in beneath there. So they had to make individual tools to go into each of the webbing structures for this composite part.

And what they used in their additive tool is they used the coefficient of thermal expansion as an advantage. So traditionally the metal tooling doesn't expand as you put it in the autoclave, but the additive tooling does. So what it allowed them to do is create a situation where they can increase the compaction in that webbing structure of the composite part just from the additive tooling expanding in the autoclave.

So it pushes that material together, compacts it down so you get more strength and a better part in the finished aspect. Also, once the tooling cools, it actually shrinks, so it's easy to remove from the composite part and use again for the next manufacturing process.

In this example for an aerospace company, they made a nine-foot-long composite fairing tool, so essentially the underbelly of this aircraft. And they printed it in seven different sections, produced it in about less than two weeks. And for this example, they actually engineered the tooling to drop out of the composite part. Otherwise they weren't able to remove the traditional tooling from the part. So they designed it in a way so that it would drop out. And this particular build was featured in the Composites World magazine if you want to look up some more information about it.

Another example. For traditional tools for closed shaped geometries, typical materials aren't really usable for trapped geometries in this case. So Porsche was able to create these inlet ducts from FDM additive manufacturing with a sacrificial method in about a day for about $150, saving them about 85% on their cost and time to produce this part, which they couldn't produce in traditional methods.

Another example for some additive tooling. If you're familiar with a process called hybrid overmolding, traditionally it's pretty popular in industry right now for composite parts to have a secondary process where they put it in an injection mold and inject a plastic structure for stiffener onto the composite part as a secondary process.

For this example, they actually printed out the plastic structure through an additive method and then thermoformed a composite bracket around that additive structure to kind of give it this hybrid part geometry, which allowed them to quickly make this part out of these two materials without having to have an injection process or any of the typical traditional methods of joining this plastic and composite manufacturing components.

And then we have some large scale composite tooling applications. The first picture is from an application for Blue Ridge National Labs, where they printed a 50-foot turbine blade. And what they were able to do is 12 different design iterations on that composite tool.

And the reason they picked this wind turbine blade is because in the industry today, for these turbine blades, the design isn't really changed because the tooling is so costly. They don't want to change the design because they know it works, and they know that if they change the design, it's going to cost them a lot of money in order to figure out what's better to do.

So what they were able to do with this tooling example is these 12 different design iterations to better optimize this turbine blade. They were able to better optimize the tool itself, so instead of a traditional wire heating method to heat the inside of the tool, they actually designed air ducts within the tool so they could use a hot air method to help cure the part in a quicker time rather than the traditional wire heating method.

In the second example, we have a boat hull that was made in six different sections. But it was made with additive and subtractive in the same working area. So this was on a Thermwood machine. But if you know Thermwood routers, they're pretty popular in the industry. But they were able to make in the same machine bed an additive process and a subtractive process so they didn't have to recalibrate any machining fixtures or anything like that. They knew exactly where the part was in the machine so they can quickly add and subtract in the same area.

I know I've been talking about some industry solutions. But what about Autodesk? So Autodesk right now has a lot of different technologies for additive, for design, for composites, and for some subtractive processes. So if we were to put all those together, we could design our tool in Fusion 360 or Inventor. We can simulate things like the thermal expansion of the material in the autoclave with these tools. We can bring that into our 3D printing technology Netfabb to build out our lattice structure, do the manufacturing optimization and things like that with the technologies there.

Then we can use our product called TruPlan, which helps us do our composite designs, create our flat patterns for traditional hand layup, laser projection, nesting, and cutting of that composite material. And then we can inspect the part and do any final composite part trimming with PowerMill and PowerInspect to round out the whole process.

So this is possible today with the tools that are available at Autodesk. So I just wanted to throw that out there.

So let's look at some alternative methods. What I mean by alternative methods is the tooling problem is only a problem if you have to have a tool. So there's some ways to get composite parts without any tooling at all. In this example, this 3D printing company is printing continuous carbon fiber in conjunction with a nylon material to get a hybrid part process, hybrid additive process.

So in this case, they're actually printing the nylon in a way that it provides kind of the same structure as a typical honeycomb core, so it gives it that flexibility within the part. But the stiffness of the composite material provides it from the exterior. So processes like this are allowing us to do more with composites in an easier way than traditionally.

[VIDEO PLAYBACK]

- Impossible Objects technology enables additive manufacturing of fiber-reinforced composites for making production parts. The CAD model is sliced into layers, and each layer is converted into a digital bit map. Layers are printed on to fiber sheets using a clear fluid and thermal technology, and a high precision positioning system dyes the inkjet heads.

Polymer powder is applied to the fiber sheet, adhering to the printed fluid. Excess powder is removed, leaving behind polymer in the shape of the bitmap. This process is repeated for all of the layers of the part. Sheets are stacked, heated to melt the polymer, and compressed to consolidate the part to its designed height. Through a mechanical or chemical process, the uncoated fibers are removed, revealing the part.

[END PLAYBACK]

MATT THORN: So in this case, Impossible Objects is actually making composite parts out of a standard sheet of carbon fiber. It's more of a fiber mat rather than continuous What they're doing, as you saw from the video, is they're making composite parts through an additive method that is atypical. It allows you to conjoin traditional additive processes and composites and make part in ways that we couldn't manufacture before.

So in this case, this was actually a solution that was brought into Netfabb. And in the industry today, there's a lot of popularity around methods that are printing through extrusion methods. So in this case we're using Netfabb in order to send instructions to a robot to print hybrid material with glass fiber embedded inside of it. So you can start to kind of see this method of printing different composite parts without any tooling.

Each layer is built on top of itself so that you really have its own support through the structure itself. You can see more examples of this, actually, in the exhibit hall this week. There's some different fiber-based extrusion methods that are gaining popularity in the composite market today.

So those are some advantages that we can take advantage of now. But what about some of the things in the future that we want to take advantage of?

So in this process, there's a company called 3D Fortify. And what they're doing is they're actually taking chopped fiber and embed it into resin, and they're using the magnetic properties of the carbon fiber to align the fiber orientations inside of that resin itself. So through this process, they're making it easy to align the fibers in the orientation, which is typically hard to do in an additive process.

A lot of the tool pathing and things like that are atypical to the standard orientations like 0 45 minus 45 and 90. But with this method, it allows you to align the fibers at specific orientations, cure the material, and then repeat that process to build up your part.

There's some other methods, some free form processes. And in these processes, the material actually cures on the fly. So it provides that strength that you need to support itself while printing in the space that it needs. So now you can print things essentially in air. You don't need any tooling or support structures to be removed or post-processed after the process.

So there's a lot of companies currently working on solutions for this. And it's going to bring new challenges to the composite world and to the tooling problem.

And for this example, this is another free form process that actually uses a UV cure. And it's embedding multiple materials into the same part. So in this case, we have fiberglass, we have fiber optics, and we have carbon fiber. And we can print that essentially without supports.

And what the advantage of here is the multi-materials allows us to now kind of make the material a bit smarter with the fiber optics. We can shine a light through it, we can send information through the fiber optics inside of the part to essentially make that material more alive and reactive to the processes so we can start to understand the stress and strain of a typical design, start to feed that back into our design process in order to manufacture these parts a bit smarter and start to learn from the structures as we use them in their daily processes.

So in summary, what we're doing is we're using additive and composite manufacturing to save some time and some cost in our traditional designs. There's existing solutions for high temperature autoclave composite solutions. These are pretty robust, pretty user friendly, additive manufacturing.

And the tools that are out there today make this an easy to use solution. The materials make things like sacrificial tooling a bit more accessible to more of the market. And additionally, additive methods are effective for additional types of tooling that we didn't talk here today, things for jigs, master molds, bonding fixtures. Things like that.

Now I want to open it up for some questions. I know I went through a lot of material there. So if you want to see something again, ask me a question. Feel free to do so. Anybody have any questions?

AUDIENCE: That video you showed of the sacrificial tooling, it showed it said, then it's dissolved. How is that dissolved?

MATT THORN: So it's dissolved-- so the question was, how is the tooling dissolved in the sacrificial tooling example? So it's actually made out of material that is soluble in a solvent bath. So if you think about it, it could be something similar to like an acetone bath, something that would melt away the additive structure because it's typically plastic, right? So it's a material that's soluble in a solvent that allows you to kind of wash out the middle of it. It does take about eight hours or so to dissolve the tool completely from the inside of that structure.

AUDIENCE: But it has to be something that-- the product that you're making has to be more robust than what you're dissolving, I guess, so that it doesn't dissolve totally.

MATT THORN: Correct. So the product that you make actually has to be more robust in two different ways, right? It has to survive the temperature and pressure of the autoclave. And the internal additive structure in that particular example provides that stiffness for the pressure.

And the material properties itself for the soluble solutions on the slide, it said it's only really works up to 200 degrees Fahrenheit as far as a temperature. Otherwise you start to mess with the plastic properties of the tooling. So it's got to survive those conditions as well as be soluble. So it's interesting material that they're using. But it isn't applicable in all cases. It's very specific to that low temperature and pressure composite tootling scenario. Great. More questions?

AUDIENCE: What about [INAUDIBLE]?

MATT THORN: So the question was, what about the accuracy of the additive part? And that's a good question. So typically, for some of the solutions that we saw for the sacrificial tooling one, in that case, the tooling is inside of the composite part. So things like surface finish really aren't a problem because it's really inside of the mold, things like that.

But for some other applications where a surface finish is an issue and things like that, we have some potential post-processing that we need to do with that additive tool to get it into the accuracy that we need it, to get it to have the surface finish so we can have that aesthetic composite part that we need to print and manufacture. So it does have its challenges today. There are some issues. And in certain situations you can't go right from print to composite manufacturing.

But it does make it easier for you to iterate on your designs, go through that design to manufacturing faster. And then typically, that metal tooling is made after that. So the additive tooling just kind of helps you iterate on the process, go through, and then once you find that perfect geometry that you need, then you go through traditional methods to get that tooling that you need.

So it depends on what you need out of it, which constraints that you apply to the process. More questions? Do we have any questions through the app? Perfect. Well, I appreciate the time. If you have any more questions I'll be up here for a little bit. And thank you for attending.

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