To this day, surgery remains a daunting activity. But for the patient, the stress and lingering pain can cast doubt on the surgery outcome. From implants to surgical guides, scan-to-3D printing has helped improve recovery and outcomes with parts designed specifically for the patient. The benefit? Patient-specific instruments reduce surgery times and provide more accurate surgical cuts, which can reduce recovery times; a benefit all active patients want.

This is not only true for healthcare; consider the sporting goods industry.  In sports equipment, helmets are sized by circumference—but unless you’re Charlie Brown, that single datapoint is not adequate to describe the shape of your head for a good helmet fit. This can make buying safe, well-fit sports equipment a challenge. At the same time, custom-made products require custom-made tooling, which is expensive and usually impractical.

However, it doesn’t have to be this way. Additive manufacturing (AM) doesn’t require tooling to produce a custom part with unique geometry. This freedom from tooling is creating market opportunities for several companies in a variety of markets, from sports equipment to medical implants and beyond. Engineering.com recently sat down with three AM experts from EOS to learn more about this useful tool in the toolbox for manufacturing.

AM is well-suited to applications in the sports equipment manufacturing world. First, compared to conventional manufacturing techniques, AM enables a nearly infinite range of geometries and material combinations. Secondly, 3D printers can produce customized parts at a similar cost to a run of identical parts, making mass customization scalable.

One example is Aetrex, which uses a proprietary foot scanning device to assess the shape, size and pressure points of a customer’s foot, then automatically generates a custom insole as a digital file which is read by the 3D printer. Another example, HEXR, delivers customized helmets using scan data collected via a smartphone app.

“Imagine you’re a hardcore cyclist living in a rural area miles away from the nearest cycling shop. How convenient is that, to just to scan your own head anywhere you can use a smartphone and have a personalized helmet produced that both fits exactly to your dimensions, and offers superior safety?” said Jon Walker, business development manager at EOS. But as scan-to-print is becoming a tool for engineers in the sports equipment market, it’s already a well-established technology in the additive manufacturing space.

“This is something that's been ongoing in the medical industry for more than ten years,” said Laura Gilmour, senior healthcare development manager at EOS. “An engineer and a surgeon will work together, and either MRI or CT scan data will be the input. Something like a cutting guide or an anatomical model to do a complicated surgery in orthopedics, or in cancer surgery, for example. Models of very complicated tumors and things of that nature can be 3D printed to serve as an aid to the procedure.”

3D printing suits medical implants, such as bone and joint replacements, especially well because of the way that AM can cost-effectively produce organic geometry, such as a porous surface on a hip replacement to aid in bone integration.

At EOS, Dr. Dave Krzeminski has a unique position: Additive Minds Consultant. His job is to support early design and application development projects to get customers off the ground and help them refine their designs and streamline product development. Currently, many of his customers are in the sporting goods space, working on projects using Digital Foam—EOS’ proprietary process for 3D printing foam-like applications with superior fit and performance.  Krzeminski understands the value of scan-to-print as a new market opportunity for mass customization. It’s engineering that enables a better product for consumers.

“To use conventional foam to create a customized product, you can imagine the challenge of manufacturing each piece of foam for each part of the head, for each player, for each athlete. It's a pretty intense workflow,” said Krzeminski. “So, with scan-to-print, you just see AM inserting itself into the workflow. The scalability and the accessibility of that is so powerful for everyone.”

How AM Adds Value to Custom Parts, Beyond Custom Geometry

In addition to being able to capture virtually any geometry from scanned data and turn it into a physical object, AM has other advantages over conventional manufacturing. For example, a typical bicycle helmet is a multimaterial and includes a molded piece of structural foam, with strips of comfort foam applied to the interior and a plastic shell on the outside. This adds assembly steps to the manufacturing process. It also affects the product lifecycle. For example, the multimaterial product may no longer be recyclable.

In contrast, an additively manufactured Digital Foam can use generated lattice structures to provide the properties of different foams with one material. The structure can vary in geometry to create a more rigid area and a softer area within the same lattice, accommodating human body pressure points, for example.

EOS 3D printers can vary laser power during a print to result in different material properties across the print. “Different laser power parameters that are put into building the structure itself can also change the response of the material,” said Gilmour.

Designing these variations in the structure is all part of the proprietary software tools built by companies like Aetrex and HEXR.

“There's research out there, specific to the headgear world, showing that fit plays an important role in maximum protection,” says Krzeminski. “So, even if you have this beautifully engineered helmet, and it has all this thought behind it and innovation, if it doesn't fit the right way, it's not going to protect you the same. That’s really driving home how scan to print can take proper fitting to the next level.”

“You have to design it such that it takes on the conformable shape and is comfortable.  Not only do you need a continuous formal lattice, but then you're also thinking about how you want to vary that lattice,” Krzeminski explained. “You can design a comfortable feel right by your head. You can integrate a dynamic response in the z-stack. And once again, you can tune that for wherever you need a little more performance here or there, but also considering how those two areas blend.”

This variation has a functional benefit, as well as for comfort and fit. 

“You don't want a stark change or an abrupt black-to-white zone. You want a nice transition between those two, because that also increases the ability for energy to be managed, or energy to be transferred within that system,” Krzeminski continued. “The way in which different athletes are going to receive an impact or need protection is going to be driven by science-based data showing they get hit more in this location, or they receive a hit that's sharper and shorter as opposed to a little longer in duration. So, that's where the tunability in the future of this really gets exciting.”

Materials

The wide range of material options available for industrial 3D printing makes scan-to-print viable in a wide range of industries. In the sports equipment space, polymers such as polyamides, elastomers and ABS are often used, while in medical devices, biocompatible materials such as titanium and stainless steel are needed. EOS has seen scan-to-print technology used with both their polymer and metal additive machines.

“Everything that we're talking about also applies to the metal side,” explained Krzeminski.

Paving the Way for Greater Innovation

Scan-to-print isn’t just exciting because it provides a cheaper way to generate custom parts compared to conventional manufacturing. The convergence of additive manufacturing and mass customization is also paving the way for innovations. For example, we spoke with the EOS experts about innovation in the sports equipment industry.

“Aside from making better-fitting products, engineers can also now make safer products. For example, helmets that actually more impact energy. Or, when it comes to an insole, you're going to make a more comfortable product, maybe a design that relieves joint pressure. Not only is it going to fit better, it's going to function better. That's one of the keys to why scan-to-print, aside from the manufacturing challenges they identified earlier, is so exciting. You're getting better fit and product improvement—that's an improvement over even a traditionally-manufactured custom product,” explained Krzeminski.

Helmets, insoles and medical implants are established use cases for this technology today. But the experts at EOS see opportunities in a range of industries, and even within sports equipment.

“Each sport has different needs, because the impacts might be a little bit different. Take a bicycle helmet, for example. Usually, it's a direct impact that happens once and you get a new helmet. Whereas in football, you're impacted many times over the course of the game. You have to have different considerations of how you're going to protect for different sports,” said Gilmour.

In any industry, engineers solving a challenging part design problem now know that scan data can be transformed into a part with little human input. That could obviate a lot of complex design work for something like a unique missing spare part, a custom jig, or even custom ergonomics for manufacturing line workers.

Is Mass Customization the Future?

To end our conversation with the EOS experts, we asked if they thought customization was the future for consumer products.

“Whether it is eyewear, dental implants or gear selectors in self-driving cars, I think customized products will become more accessible as the technology becomes more economical. I don't think it's going to completely displace every commodity product. I think there's always going to be a place for both,” said Krzeminski.

“I think you could see that customers and markets are demanding personalization and are willing to pay a premium, but I don't think it will completely replace mass production and one size (or a few sizes) fit all. I don't know that I need a customizable drinking glass when I go to dinner, right? I'll just use whatever's there.”

To find out more about using scan-to-print and additive manufacturing in your industry, visit EOS.