The Metal 3D Printing Technology Report: Chapter 8: Insider Insights
In this chapter, we present three exclusive interviews with industry experts from Xometry, UltiMaker, and Aibuild, key sponsors of the Wevolver Metal 3D Printing Technology Report.
23 Jan, 2025. 11 min read
Image credit: Technion
Understand the Future of Metal 3D Printing
The Metal 3D Printing Technology Report is your essential guide to the latest advances, applications, and real-world insights into additive manufacturing with metal. Packed with detailed case studies, practical information, and interviews with industry leaders, this report reveals how metal 3D printing is transforming industries and pushing the boundaries of manufacturing.
Read the intro to the report here and an excerpt from chapter 6 below.
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In the final chapter of the Metal 3D Printing Technology Report, we present three exclusive interviews with industry experts from Xometry, UltiMaker, and Aibuild, key sponsors of the Wevolver Metal 3D Printing Technology Report.
In Conversation With: Xometry
In a conversation between Wevolver and Xometry, Greg Paulsen, Director of Application Engineering at Xometry, and Matt Schmidt, Senior Solutions Engineer at Xometry, discuss the latest trends and challenges in metal additive manufacturing, as well as their vision for the future of metal AM.
The big three
When it comes to the leading industries for metal AM adoption, Paulsen and Schmidt easily identify Aerospace, Automotive, and Medical as the big three. These industries leverage the technology for its ability to create complex, lightweight, and highly precise parts that traditional manufacturing methods struggle to achieve. “Whether it’s a medical implant or complex aerospace assembly, these industries have the means and expertise to take advantage of these processes,” explains Schmidt.
Within these industries (and others), the greatest adoption is coming from companies and organizations that not only have the resources and skills to devote to metal AM but also those who have more flexibility when it comes to product development. “Newer industries, like new space, are able to embrace metal AM as part of their workflow more quickly since they have free range to build and design,” says Paulsen. “Trying to retrofit metal AM in a legacy system becomes much more difficult.”
Realistic expectations
Paulsen and Schmidt also emphasize that the metal parts often seen at trade shows, the ones with highly complex organic geometries, only represent a small piece of metal AM production. This is because these complex parts require time, skills, and resources to build and qualify. “It’s not an overnight process,” Paulsen explains. “Tradeshows are overburdened with these 1% parts because they’re so cool, so it skews the industry perception a bit around the technology’s accessibility. If you’re saving $100,000 annually by shaving down the weight of a part using topology optimization, it’s worth it for an engineer to put the time and investment in, but it can be a different story if you’re not hitting that threshold.”
Schmidt adds: “Once you get down to the cost of making a topology optimized part, you’re looking at feasibility. Even if you want to take advantage of lightweighting for material savings or being eco-friendly, often the costs can override the value. It’s very case sensitive.”
So while metal AM is definitely used to create highly complex, weight optimized parts, the technology also has more “bread and butter” applications, such as maintenance, repair, and operations (MRO), or other applications where it would be prohibitively expensive to use the original production process due to smaller volume requirements. Paulsen also adds that cast replacement parts are also a common application for customers whose sustainment requirements for die-cast parts have decreased. “In terms of volumes, typically I see smaller parts in the hundreds, and not too often, we go into the thousands,” Schmidt adds.
On the future of metal AM
In the coming years, Xometry’s experts anticipate a more software-driven design approach for not only metal AM but the broader manufacturing industry. “I like to think about how word processors evolved over time, from having a squiggle under words to indicate a possible misspelling, to different color underlines to indicate the type of grammar correction. Now, you can type something and it will automatically correct,” Paulsen says, drawing a parallel between metal AM’s continued evolution. “I think placing the paradigm of the manufacturing process within CAD software is going to be very important to grow the industry. In other words, learning curves are being built into the design process so you can ensure that the printed product is in line with what you’ve designed.”
Schmidt adds: “My view on metal AM moving forward is that OEMs across the industry, from materials, to software, to hardware, to post-processing, need to start working closer together. I understand that IP is highly coveted, but industry collaboration is critical to moving AM forward faster. All the complexity of metal AM and the slow moving adoption can be cured through this.”
In Conversation With: UltiMaker
UltiMaker, known best for its thermoplastic 3D printing solutions, entered into the metal AM realm in 2022, when it introduced its Metal Expansion Kit, which enables UltiMaker users to upgrade their S5 and S7 3D printers for printing metal parts. With this product, UltiMaker became one of a small number of companies cornering the market for entry-level extrusion 3D printing platforms. Since April 2024, UltimMaker’s industrial platform, Factor4, also offers the possibility to 3D print metal parts.
“UltiMaker’s metal solution represents an entry-level solution for metal FFF,” explains Andre Gasperini, former Product Manager at UltiMaker. “The USP for our technology is that it leverages know-how in the metal AM field, from material suppliers like BASF to sintering services and furnace manufacturers. With them, we are working to bring a full end-to-end ecosystem together that enables our users to print 99.6% pure metal parts with a sub-$10K investment and quick ROI.”
The Right Applications
To date, UltiMaker’s metal AM solution has been used for a range of applications, excelling in particular at the production of small tools (<10 cm), jigs, and functional prototypes. In general, UltiMaker has found interest coming from a wide range of end-user industries.
“I think the major users are those who are developing automotive or transportation machinery, because metal is used a lot in those environments and they are used to producing parts internally,” Gasperini says. “Where we have seen unexpected interest was from consumer goods, for example watchmakers and design studios that are preparing bespoke objects. Our technology enables them to make metal parts internally without a high investment.”
Addressing Challenges
One of the key challenges UltiMaker recognizes to the growing adoption of metal 3D printing is related to application spotting. “For us there are still some limits in the capabilities of the process—we can’t do everything,” Gasperini says. “Application spotting and validating is one of the major challenges that we see as an adoption barrier.”
The other big challenge the Dutch company has seen is related to managing print failures. Gasperini continues: “The question is, when failure occurs, how do we improve the process to ensure that we don’t have the same failure again.” UltiMaker is addressing this challenge in a couple of ways. For one, it encourages customers to work closely with its experts (or resellers). “Sharing our knowledge is the key way to solve the adoption barrier and provide confidence in the long term,” he adds.
From another perspective, UltiMaker has a software offering that makes the 3D printing workflow easier. “With Cura settings for printing metal filaments users predict what is going to happen in the post-processing of the part and this is already anticipated during slicing and printing,” explains Jeanine Graat, Regional Marketing Manager EMEA. “And with Print Process Reporting (only available on Factor 4) you can check if everything you predicted has been executed in the way you expect.”
“It closes the loop between the ideal settings and how the machine has translated those inputs from Cura to the part,” Gasperini elaborates. “This also brings confidence into metal 3D printing, which is very important.”
Collaboration is King
Looking to the future, UltiMaker’s experts see greater collaboration across the metal AM industry as key to the technology’s proliferation and success. In UltiMaker’s specific case, collaboration was vital to the development of its metal AM ecosystem. “AM companies don’t have to do everything themselves,” Gasperini says. “It’s a process where a lot of contributions from experts in different fields—like software, materials, hardware, process—are added together. I think one way forward is to develop things together and split the value of what we are developing, so there is economic viability to joining forces. It’s something more manufacturers should be doing to innovate faster.”
Graat emphasizes this point further adding: “There was really close collaboration in developing our metal AM solution. It involved a lot of feedback from all our partners and everything in the Metal Expansion Kit was tested thoroughly and verified by customers. It is really an ecosystem solution in that way.”
To the Next-Gen of Engineers
When asked to share their insights for the next-generation of engineers seeking to participate in the metal AM industry, UltiMaker’s team points straight at design for AM. “I think new engineers need to understand that AM is another language for making parts.” Gasperini comments. “They need to learn the design paradigm and how the production process works.”
Marc Uyttenboogaard, Product Manager at UltiMaker, concludes: “If you look at other production technologies, most of the time there is a guidebook or guidelines for the design process. 3D printing is still sometimes used as a black box, you put your model in and get a part out, but I think if you really design for 3D printing, there are a lot more applications that will open up.”
In Conversation With: Aibuild
London-based software company Aibuild specializes in the use of automation to simplify advanced, multi-axis toolpaths for additive manufacturing, CNC machining, and hybrid manufacturing. Guy Brown, Aibuild’s Head of R&D, explained to Wevolver how synergy between different stages in the AM workflow—and even between different manufacturing technologies—is opening up new horizons for metal AM.
Key challenges addressed
Advances in 3D printing hardware and materials are continuously opening up advanced applications of the technology across a range of industries. However, the pool of engineers and AM experts capable of harnessing the full power of additive manufacturing when designing and printing parts remains relatively small. As a software platform provider for AM and CNC machining, Aibuild sees its role in the manufacturing landscape as helping companies to simplify and unify complex processes.
“There are probably two main hurdles and two things we need to aim towards,” Brown explains. “The first is making it easier to print parts without the need for user expertise and without spending a long time preparing toolpaths and testing parameters.” This effectively means leaving as much as possible to the software without losing sight of the user’s unique requirements. “The ultimate additive manufacturing software interface would be one where the interface doesn’t exist. You would just upload your part and then it would print the part, without you needing to look at anything or check anything. That’s what we’re aiming for in terms of full automation.”
A second hurdle concerns cohesion between part design and manufacturing. “For any manufacturing process, you need Design for Manufacturing,” Brown says. “But in additive manufacturing in particular there are elements that make it even more critical. For example, your toolpath and the direction of printing affects the properties of the part. So that second hurdle is basically integrating Design for Additive Manufacturing (DfAM) with slicing and process monitoring. By doing things separately, there’s a lot of synergy you’re missing out on.”
Current focuses in metal AM
In metal additive manufacturing, Aibuild is primarily concerned with large-format and multi-axis processes like Directed Energy Deposition (DED) and Wire Arc Additive Manufacturing (WAAM). Today, one of the most important applications of such processes is the repair of expensive end-use parts. “Let’s say you have a $150,000 injection mold tool made from hard steel, and it’s just got a little chip on it,” Brown explains. “You shouldn’t have to throw that part away. With DED, you can deposit directly on the damaged tool, fully conformally. And then bang, you can put that injection mold tool back into service in a week, having saved yourself not just the cost of the tool, but also eight weeks of waiting time.”
While printing on substrates is an important application of DED, the process is not without its areas of difficulty, two of which are directly addressed by Aibuild software. The first issue is the identification of defects on a damaged part. Another is printing on an existing part rather than the print bed. “If I put my damaged mold tool on the bed, the machine doesn’t know exactly where it’s sitting on the bed,” Brown explains. “Even if I use a CMM probe, it's still a very lengthy process. So what we're doing in the software is in situ 3D scanning on the build bed. Because the bed itself is already calibrated in the software, taking a 3D scan of the part and the build bed lets us get a comparison of the damaged part to the original CAD while also, at the same time, calibrating it in the machine’s workspace. And that’s suddenly a super-streamlined workflow.”
The hybrid manufacturing future
Part of Aibuild’s vision is not only to achieve cohesion between design and manufacturing, but to create total synergy between manufacturing processes, both additive and subtractive. It already offers solutions for CNC machining, but the company sees seamless integration of different technologies as a major opportunity. “We are incorporating CNC milling in our software because a lot of customers want to print and then machine on the same system, with automatic tool changing,” Brown says. “The nice thing about that is that you don’t need to worry about part calibration, and you don't need to move between beds and rejig the part.”
The end goal is convergent manufacturing, in which engineers can use one single platform to manage all of their manufacturing processes in one place instead of having several manufacturing processes on different machines. “It’s a request we often get from big enterprise customers because they’re having to use five or six different softwares to do the manufacturing execution system and then toolpaths and then process monitoring,” Brown explains. “The synergy of having all those machines controlled in one place and only one type of software to learn to control all these different systems makes life so much easier.”
Read an excerpt from the chapters here:
Introduction Chapter
The Metal 3D Printing Technology Report is your essential guide to the latest advances, applications, and real-world insights into additive manufacturing with metal.
In the first chapter of our new report, we examine the dominant methods of metal 3D printing—metal laser powder bed fusion (LPBF), directed energy deposition (DED), metal extrusion, and binder jetting—as well as other still-emerging or more niche processes.
The metal additive manufacturing market features various feedstock types, with powder being the dominant choice for LPBF, some DED methods, and binder jetting. Metal wire and bound metal filament are also used in specific technologies.
In this chapter, we separate metal AM post-processing into four categories: debinding and sintering, CNC machining and milling, heat treatment, and quality assurance.
Metal 3D printing offers significant design opportunities with its high geometrical freedom, but it requires careful design for additive manufacturing (DfAM) to address equipment and material constraints, a process supported by DfAM and 3D printing simulation tools in most major CAD software.
This chapter of the report will lay out and examine the various applications of metal additive manufacturing, with a particular focus on end-use applications in the dominant metal AM adoption industries.
Chapter 8
