In the past, the 3D printing industry could be described as a small pond with a couple of big fish. Stratasys and 3D Systems both have market capitalizations of just over $1 billion. But across from the pond was an ocean full of whales, companies like Autodesk, Airbus and GE. A few years ago, the wall between the pond and the ocean began to crumble. And now, the wall may be completely broken down. The latest whale to enter the 3D water is HP.
HP is currently finishing construction on a 58,000-square-foot expansion to its offices in Vancouver, Wash. With a market cap of over $21 billion, entering the 3D printing market is just one of many strategies, albeit an important one that the business is employing to grow and succeed. While visiting the new Vancouver campus, ENGINEERING.com was able to learn from HP Inc. staff, as well as CTO Shane Wall and President of 3D Printing Stephen Nigro, about the company’s larger vision and how 3D printing fits into that vision.
Blended Reality
When HP’s Multi Jet Fusion (MJF) 3D printing platform was unveiled in October 2014, the technology was framed as a part of the company’s larger vision for its products, an ideology referred to as “blended reality.” While at HP’s new site in Vancouver, CTO Shane Wall elaborated on this concept.
“Blended reality is the idea that our physical reality is intersecting with digital reality in a very reinforcing and powerful way,” Wall explained. “The people, places and things that we are today are intersecting with communications and analytics and they’re doing it in a virtual cycle. They do it in a virtual cycle to a point in which the technology disappears and becomes a part of our life. It’s merely the background on which we operate.”
The executive further broke the blended reality ecosystem into three distinct categories: 3D transformation, hypermobility and the Internet of all Things.
Hypermobility
Hypermobility, according to Wall, means “moving out of the world of the glass slab—tablets, phablets [hybrid phone and tablet] and phones that you stare at on average 137 times a day—into a world in which the technology comes upon you and disappears into the background.”
Fulfilling this idea, HP recently released a number of products meant to increase the mobility of the company’s customers. This includes:
- The “world’s thinnest laptop,” the 0.41-in-thin HP Spectre;
- The HP Elite x3, a phablet powerful enough to act as a standalone PC to connect with a monitor at one’s desk, a “lapdock” on the plane, or as a smartphone;
- The HP DeskJet 3755, an all-in-one printer targeted at millennials and capable of streamlined printing from social media sites.
- A growing line of smartwatches that elegantly maintains the look of traditional timepieces but with hidden functionality and Bluetooth connectivity.
3D Transformation
HP’s concept of 3D transformation has materialized in the form of MJF and the company’s Sprout computing platform, a unique computer with a built-in Intel RealSense 3D camera and touchscreen mat that combine to allow users to scan physical objects for digital manipulation. While gesture control with RealSense is meant for a more intuitive computing experience, 3D printing enables users to bring their digital creations into the physical world, thus bridging the digital and physical divide.
The MJF platform, however, is much more powerful. Though officially announced in May 2016 with multimaterial and multicolor capabilities, the technology has the potential to turn both the 3D printing industry and the much, much larger manufacturing industry on their heads.
Currently, the HP Jet Fusion 3D 3200 and HP Jet Fusion 3D 4200 jets a liquid binder and a detailing agent onto a bed of translucent nylon powder before a set of infrared lamps passes over the material and fuses it together. However, Jeff Fawcett, 3D future product marketing manager at HP, explained that the beauty of the platform is just how flexible it is.
“We have three degrees of freedom that we can play with. We have the material itself, in this case nylon. You can imagine different types of material that can get you different properties,” Fawcett explained, holding up a colorful, 3D-printed object. “We have the agents that you can apply; in this case, you can apply different colors to the part. Then, we have the energy we’re applying, the infrared in this case. But any one of those can be changed and produce all sorts of different properties. This is the first real application of voxel control. In this case, we’re controlling the color of the part at any point within the part.”
This voxel-level control is the key to MJF technology. Nigro spoke to the degree to which a printed object can be manipulated. “Every 21 microns, we determine the state of a voxel. That voxel will be there: yes or no. In the future, we’re going to say: is that voxel yellow or green? In the future, we’ll say: is that voxel conductive or not? Really, if you look at the other 3D printing technologies on the market, they’re not voxel-based. Ours is the only technology that is and we’re able to address over 340 million voxels every second,” Nigro said.
Internet of All Things
Voxel-level control in 3D printing is essential to Wall’s concept of the “Internet of all Things”, which Wall discussed with an intentional emphasis on the word “all.” While the Internet of Things might involve connecting electronic components to the web for various applications, HP intends to broaden this concept to include “physical objects that have no technology embedded in them” that “can actually be associated with an Internet service for all sorts of disruptive offerings,” according to Wall.
Think of QR codes and digital watermarks on paper, which can be linked to web-based apps when scanned with a smartphone. The same idea can be translated to physical objects through 3D printing, Wall explained.
“The next step is when we can take those unique markings and put them into the 3D-printed parts that we have today so that there are 3D watermarks in the parts,” said Wall. “We can then track every single manufactured part from the source and design through an entire value chain down to a printed part.”
On the one hand, imperceptible watermarks can be printed onto the surface of items to be read by a smartphone app, just as Wall described. These watermarks can be used as visual serial numbers to track a part’s manufacturing history or other purposes.
On the other hand, colors printed within an object can provide visual indication of the part’s overall wear-and-tear. A gear might have a black exterior color, but as it wears over time, subsequent layers of color are exposed to reveal the part’s lifespan. A layer of yellow might indicate that the part has some life left, while a layer of red would suggest that it needs to be replaced.
Perhaps more exciting is the fact that MJF can leverage HP’s 30 years of experience of developing inks to 3D print with unique fluids, such as conductive materials. At the unveiling of the new Vancouver office, Nigro held up a 3D-printed chain link with embedded strain gauges that could be hooked up to an IoT app to provide users with information about the part under a load.
The $12-Trillion Manufacturing Industry
“Last year, 3D printing was about a $5-billion industry. 2D printing is a $230-billion industry. Manufacturing is a $12-trillion industry,” Nigro pointed out.
“There’s all this excitement about 3D printing, but it’s small,” Nigro continued. “Really, the first question we asked ourselves getting into 3D printing is how do we make this a much, much bigger pie—not just for HP, but for everyone. That’s where we said that the key to the future of 3D printing is to take it from prototyping today to production.”
Nigro was clearly excited about the technology and, when asked, said that he does believe MJF is capable of producing end parts. The company is so confident, in fact, that about half of the plastic components in MJF 3D printers are printed with MJF technology.
HP’s first MJF customers seem confident, as well. When HP finally unveiled the HP Jet Fusion 3D 3200 and HP Jet Fusion 3D 4200 systems, the company had four huge customers in tow: Nike, BMW, Johnson & Johnson and Jabil Circuit. This last name is an important one, as Jabil is the world’s third-largest contract manufacturer.
In a recent Q&A between Nigro and John Dulchinos, Jabil’s vice president and general manager of global automation and 3D printing, Dulchinos spoke to the company’s vision for the technology. It was a fairly forward-thinking one for a company that is so dependent on centralized manufacturing and injection molding.
Over the next three years, Dulchinos sees 3D printing implemented for mass customization and producing complex geometries, as well as “support[ing] low-to middle-volume manufacturing.” “What really surprised us, as we went through the analysis with HP, was how we looked at our supply chain,” Dulchinos. “What really shocked us was that a significant percentage of them made economic sense for conversion. Moving those parts over to Multi Jet Fusion printing in the next few years will save time and money and improve the overall efficiency of Jabil’s operations.”
While the concept of distributed manufacturing is one that is endorsed by many makers and 3D printing networks like 3D Hubs, it is surprising to see that a giant like Jabil may be hip to the idea as well. As Dulchino told Nigro in their Q&A, “Today, we have about 100 factories spread around the world. Ten years from now we may have 1,000 factories, or 5,000 factories, all smaller and all concentrated in locations that are closer to where our end-markets are and where customers are, allowing us to produce products on demand.”
HP Vancouver
HP’s new offices in Vancouver, WA will allow the company to further develop its technology toward this possible future. With over 275,000 sq ft of office space, the campus is not only designed with an employee-centric culture in mind, but it is also the site of HP’s development around color 3D printing. Collaborating with HP’s teams in Barcelona, Spain and Corvallis, Oregon, the Vancouver operation is currently on track to release the next generation MJF platform in 2018.