Arcam AB chief executive officer Magnus Rene says the Swedish maker of 3D printers might soon have trouble keeping up with orders as airplane and engine makers start using the technology to make parts.
With General Electric Co, Pratt & Whitney Holdings LLC and Rolls Royce Holdings PLC as customers, Arcam is preparing for growth unforeseen when the Molndal, Sweden-based company was focused on the 3D printing of medical implants, like knee joints.
“Two or three years ago, the question was whether the aerospace industry would start producing in this way,” Rene said in a telephone interview.
“Now it’s just a question of when,” he said.
As the industry now races to use 3D printing in order to make aircraft components lighter, GE Aviation has said it expects to print more than 100,000 parts for its jet engines by 2020. The US engine maker is to use Arcam machines for production of light-weight turbine blades by 2018 at the very latest, Rene said.
The global market for 3D printing, also known as additive manufacturing, grew to more than US$4.1 billion last year, from US$3 billion in 2013, according to a report from consultant Wohlers Associates.
Less than half of the market is for commercial production of parts, with most printers still being used to make prototypes.
A shift is now on to move to live production, according to Olaf Diegel, a professor of product development at the Lund University in Sweden and a consultant with Wohlers.
GE’s publicly stated intentions have made other companies in the aerospace industry step up their own efforts.
“They are leading the way,” Diegel said in an interview.
“That’s pushing the rest of the industry,” he said.
“We are aggressively exploring opportunities for using additive manufacturing to produce several different jet engine components when the technology provides a clear benefit,” GE Aviation head of additive manufacturing Greg Morris said by e-mail.
Some of GE’s competitors have decided to start production using Arcam machines, according to Rene, who declined to name them.
3D printers build an object by thinly layering materials such as plastic powder, metal or liquid resin, following instructions from a computer-drawn blueprint.
Arcam’s two-decade-old system uses an electron beam to melt metal powder into firm objects.
The Swedish company says the method offers a faster manufacturing process than competing laser-based technologies, which are better suited for certain complex, smaller parts.
“There are some things lasers do well, some things we do well and some things that can be done with either technology,” Rene said.
Within the implant and aircraft parts markets, Arcam competes with the trio of German laser-based printing machine makers, EOS GmbH, Concept Laser GMBH and SLM Solutions GmbH.
According to the chief executive officer, aerospace offers far bigger growth potential than the market for 3D-printed orthopedic implants, which Arcam currently dominates.
“The aerospace industry is some 50 to 100 times larger than the implants industry,” Rene said. “Many components are unlikely to be made in 3D printers because they’re too large, but it’s still at least 10 times the size.”
The biggest challenge is to convince manufacturers that it is worth switching to additive manufacturing despite higher costs for materials, Diegel said.
Metal powders for 3D printing, like those made by Arcam’s AP&C subsidiary in Canada or by Sweden’s Hoganas, are still “10 to 100 times more expensive” than materials for conventional manufacturing.
Nevertheless, he said, the shift is gaining momentum.
“We’re at that tipping point now,” Diegel said.
“Within the next five years, we’ll see it blast off like crazy and be adopted not just in aeronautics, but in other industries as well,” he said.
Arcam delivered about 50 3D printing systems in the past year and though the company has doubled production capacity at its plant in Molndal, Rene expects periods when demand for its machines is likely to outstrip manufacturing capacity.
“In terms of floor space, we could probably make about 150 systems per year in Sweden,” Rene said.
“That would require more assemblers, electricians and service engineers. We’re building that capacity,” he said.
POTENTIAL SETBACK: Although Chinese chip designers and foundry firms already have US EDA software, they might be unable to update those programs under new US rules The US’ latest ban on advanced electronic design automation (EDA) software exports to China might hinder Chinese chip companies from accessing advanced semiconductor technology, as they attempt to upgrade to 3-nanometer processes in the next three to five years, market researcher TrendForce Corp (集邦科技) said yesterday. The US Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security on Friday announced bans on EDA tools for gate-all-around field-effect transistors (GAAFET), a new-generation semiconductor technology that US chipmaker Intel Corp and Samsung Electronics Co from South Korea are adopting to make 4-nanometer and 3-nanometer chips. The bureau in a statement said that gate-all-around field-effect transistor
WIDENING THE FIELD: Human resources managers must drop prejudices regarding gender, appearance and age to find the best candidates, Micro Technology said The job market for Taiwan’s semiconductor industry remained tight this quarter, as hiring activity slowed from a record high last quarter, a survey released yesterday by online human resource firm 104 Job Bank (104人力銀行) showed. Ongoing labor shortages have prompted local semiconductor firms to recruit more women and foreigners in Taiwan and in Southeast Asia, the job bank said. The talent gap in the first quarter reached 35,000 people per month, a surge of 39.8 percent from the same period last year, as the contactless economy and digital transformation shore up demand for semiconductors, 104 Job Bank said in its annual report
DISMAL OUTLOOK: A Citigroup analyst predicted firms face ‘the worst semiconductor downturn in at least a decade,’ due to inventory build and the potential of a recession Semiconductor stocks tumbled after Micron Technology Inc became the latest chipmaker to warn about slowing demand, triggering concern that the industry is heading into a painful downturn. In the US on Tuesday, the Philadelphia semiconductor index sank 4.6 percent, with all 30 members in the red, its biggest drop in about two months. In Asia, chip stocks from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) to Samsung Electronics Co, SK Hynix Inc and Tokyo Electron Ltd slumped. Investors are growing increasingly skittish as the notoriously cyclical industry is hurtling toward a prolonged slump after years of widespread shortages that led to heavy
POSITIVE CULTURE: Pursuing 12-inch wafers earlier than peers helped TSMC lead the industry, said a former executive, whose main regret was working for SMIC in China Corporate culture at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) is what made the chipmaker a leading player in the global industry, a former executive said in an interview with California’s Computer History Museum. “One of the really important reasons that TSMC succeeded” is the culture at the firm, where “if equipment went down at two o’clock in the morning, we just called an equipment engineer,” and the worker would not complain, said former TSMC joint chief operating officer Chiang Shan-yi (蔣尚義). “We didn’t really do anything special, anything great, but we didn’t make any major mistakes,” when compared with competitors, such
RSS