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hello and welcome at the second edition of empower's metal 3d printing application special aviation and space were the largest industries for metal additive manufacturing in the past years according to our latest report the aerospace sector is responsible for almost one third of machine sales revenue and more than 50 percent of the material being used is titanium alloys besides conventional laser powderbed fusion one of the very promising technologies for aerospace is wire based deposition the airbus group company premium aerotech is one of the first users to bring this technology to serial production today is a big pleasure to welcome jan hunningham he's industrialization manager for ded technologies at premium aerotech it's very nice to have you here today can you give us a very brief overview of the additive manufacturing activities at premium air tech sure thank you for the for the kind of introduction i'm looking forward to speaking with you about am and the technology branch directed energy deposition or ded within the airbus group several organizations use the powderbed fusion technology for different purposes mostly r d prototyping or tooling and spare parts however since the beginning of the of the hype premium aerotech was very determined to use the technology in serial production so parameter development part development and consolidation of several parts collaboration with equipment manufacturer to make the 3d printers more compatible with with our requirements and needs or defining or defining even specifications for for printing and testing those were all part of the of the first years so it was a very very long road that we went down with uh with powerbat and now finally it has been successful yeah we established and qualified a needs supply chain delivering cost and performance optimized parts in serial production since 2016 we deliver the first part been everywhere in the news for the for the a400 m military aircraft and since the last year we deliver three components for uh for the a350 civil program as well um so pretty cool and now finally to fully exploit the technology of powderbed where you have endless possibilities we we successfully have a process qualification so that means not every part needs to be qualified but whatever we print effectively is already qualified if we stick to our supply chain that makes everything a lot uh more agile and and quicker to bring new parts to the to the aircraft uh yeah but um pig or premium aerotech is a manufacturer of large error structures so our portfolio contains a lot of rather simple meter scale structural components that first you can't make them with powder bed because they're too large for the equipment and they are more suitable for directed energy deposition in general so we are using now both technologies and they are not a competitor um to each other but they uh yeah work work very well for all the difference for all the different applications that we that we have so we identified a global business potential for um for our parts and we want to start the qualification of the first primary structure part with ded next year so you're focusing on wire-based additive manufacturing at premium tech and what is the value proposition of this technology for an aircraft component supplier yeah it's it's very different from uh from part of that if i may compare again in part of it it's typically brackets or consolidated assemblies so effectively it's very difficult to make parts cheaper with powder bed but you can improve parts with dd that's that's not the value proposal at all with ded it is solely saving material costs or but or finally and finally the part costs so we don't do a topology optimization we make a simple one-to-one replacement um and and save material costs and for example with introduction of the a350 in in 2015 it's an uh within within carbon fiber uh mainframe you have um the problem that aluminium which you typically would like to lose to use that's not compatible with with carbon fiber so this this is the reason why a lot of titanium had to be used in in the in the body those are very expensive those are several meters in size uh the material is expensive and it's also very expensive to to process it so yeah to cope with um with all the demand because suddenly we had to process a lot of titanium we had to significantly significantly improve the cost um by far because we have we're talking about parts of meter scale by to fly above above 20 and so on so that means that 95 percent of of all the material it's it's scrap and when you buy titanium you pay somewhere around 50 per kilo and the scrap is virtually worth nothing so yeah some of the parts cost easily ten thousands per piece and that's what we're targeting can you um give us more details about the applications you're targeting with with this technology like where's the impact of for this industry especially from a commercial perspective okay so for for our industry i guess it's very different from from from other industries dede can be very good for for lead time savings for example um but for us it's it's really a recurring cost and if you look at an aircraft uh you have you have four regions uh that contain expensive titanium parts that is the the landing gear the wings the pylon so the structure holding the the turbine the nacelle and and the aerostructure and all of them have basically um titanium components with very different geometries and characteristics so um you can and uh and and furthermore they might look very very different from each other but they have one thing in common apart from that they are expensive they are also very very critical uh and introducing a new technology comes typically not in the way that you introduce the most critical parts first you have to introduce small parts with low criticality uh in in the beginning to um to show the authorities that you're able to to install all this part um an industrial environment and then you may go to the to the more interesting parts unfortunately there are not so many low critical parts so that's a bit of the challenge that we that we have but we are trying to mature this technology and once it is uh established you can have another com commercial advantage which is when you when when you're happy with the technology and when you're very um confident about it uh you may use it to make uh parts with it then you that you cannot any other way but then we are not and that's uh when we talk about uh next generation aircrafts for the current generations we are looking at one-to-one replacement okay so no design optimization but you print a raw part a raw bulk part and then you use a conventional machining process just yet you have less scrap less scrap material around correct and you always have to have a fallback solution before you put it in production so the parts that we are going to make if something happens we still have the option to machine it from plate it's not that we want it but we have to demonstrate that we have this option so as i understand it's not yet fully embedded in production um where is the maturity level and for really flying parts and what are the challenges you are now dealing with in those last steps before entering production so from my experience um i think it is already relatively mature but because of what i said is that it mostly targets the most critical parts on the aircraft uh that is the main reason what's what has been stopping the technology from being more widely used on on aircraft so so does that mean the technology actually doesn't really have to change it's mostly on the user side to implement it to accept it and to make all the proofs that need to be done yes and that is very expensive because you have to demonstrate by building many large parts from high value material and perform a lot of tests destructive and under destructive so the the first step basically is extremely expensive and you need to convince um or the shareholder and the and the customer which are the the civil programs that um that in the future they're gonna save a lot but in the beginning you need to convince them to spend a lot of money in order to deliver part basically at the same price up to your estimation what what kind of forecast can you give us from from your experience now and from your uh technical perspective when when will parts be ready when will parts be flying in aircrafts that we are flying with soon again hopefully well it's been in the news that um there is currently a supplier being uh qualified as a supplier together with uh with a with a with a machine um so the installation should happen uh relatively quickly or in other words it must happen quickly so there is a lot of interest of people to um to be quick on that because we have to because the the competition is quick as well so i hope that on our side uh we will deliver the first part to our assembly line in in 2022. we talked a lot about technology now and um but i think it's it's also always very interesting to to learn a bit more about company struggles and company challenges and success factors to implement this technology you mentioned already yet that you you have a large investment for qualification efforts um but besides that how do you deal for example with with um a traditional engineering methods that had been established for a long time do you need to convince people are there certain methods that you can put in to actually implement the technology not only from a technology perspective but also from a from a company and strategic perspective um if i try to convince people they first they hear additive manufacturing so that second they think about powder bed we need to get rid of that because they are not at all the same ded is a lot closer to machining from plate or machining forgings and and castings and you need to get these parts on the on the shop floor because um engineers need to be aware of that engineers need to be aware of the of the design freedom um designers need to know what um or how they can design new parts so a lot of communication and transparency is is really really needed and you need to engage the the customers and the shareholders on a frequent basis that's that's very important that's this is the first point to convince the customer and second you need to convince the the qualification authorities and we have an internal qualification authority that wants to see obviously a lot of tests first so you need to demonstrate for both sides quality and price okay now um we talked about wire deposition mostly and i think that's this is uh your major and you're focusing in this field but if we now look into other 3d printing technologies that that claim high deposition rates large parts that might fit into um into the components that you're looking at especially in titanium alloy there there are technologies like cold spray um digital aeros is very active in this field are there certain technologies that that stick out that you say have a potential in the future would is it even possible that the applications you're looking at now are going to change again technologies or is it more going to be a complementary future ded or or high deposition rate technology out there well first of all i'm a big fan of cold spray i'm a big fan of jewel printing by by digital alloys looking at the commercial side in our industry these these technologies may target relatively similar geometries so it will be challenging to replace a ded with a with a different high deposition rate technology because you make the parts already but i really see these parts in in other industries or you mentioned cold spray which is where you're not melting the part so effectively it's it's solid state um same as jewel printing which is not completely liquid um but at the same time you can definitely mention a friction stir additive and and all these technologies and all these technologies address um different materials you can you can make unweldable metal preforms um so i think they have a good chance at uh at inconel or even um or even aluminium alloys um but for titanium serial production it's gonna it's gonna be difficult for these unfortunately all right well thank you very much i think that that gave us a very good insight into into your activities and i think what we learned again is applications is is one of the key point in in additive finding the right applications but we also learned that um in in your industry especially and there might be some there are some others definitely that also have to always consider the high investments for qualifications is it's not that easy it takes several years until you really can bring it into production until you earn out afterwards it was it was a pleasure talking to you thank you very much for those very valuable insights thank you very much uh absolutely was nice talking to you as well and um i'm happy if there are any follow-up discussions so thanks again for the invitation and i hope that we were able to announce uh something next year all right well that that was it for today's special in aviation for wire technologies for wire ded technologies thanks for watching today's special and don't forget to subscribe to our youtube channel until next time you