How DED Is Transforming Aerospace Manufacturing

Hey, thanks for having me. Glad to be here.

Yeah. So, laser powder DED. So, really the DED stands for directed energy deposition, but really the way we're doing that is using a high power laser. And we focus that on a metal surface, whether it be a plate or something we're going to actually do some printing on, and that creates a localized melt pool. As that establishes the melt pool, then we're using a feedstock of metal powder which gets blown directly into that melt pool and is absorbed quickly. It actually instantly solidifies. So you get very good material properties based on the rapid solidification of that. Then when we actually move the print head around, we're actually able to grow a part up layer by layer just like you would at any other of the common 3D printing formats that a lot of people may be more familiar with. Typically with metal, it happens in more of an inert environment. So we can maintain the material properties, not doing any pickup of oxygen or moisture or anything that would be detrimental to it. But because it is non-contact, you really are able to use the technology at a large scale where we actually can control when and how big that melt pool is by controlling the size and the power of the laser. We can control how much powder feedstock is going in. And then at the same time we can use a lot of different materials that are just in powder form or made into an easy powder.

Yeah. So, I mean, really, you can do it in a lot of things. I mean, most of this happens in controlled environments, so within, we'll say, a glove box or some nature of enclosure. But it can be applied to basically a lot of the industry. So we do things of actually printing parts directly to near net shape, so we get the part directly from a 3D model. So we have the design and we go through a slicing to tell where and when to turn the laser on, when to add the material and build the part. And we can do other things of actually repairing components where we're actually going to use this now primarily with the high power laser. The control of this, this isn't done in field, but you can establish printers and whatnot near areas that maybe need the repair actually being done to maybe more common components. But this could be aircraft components, you know, your ballasts, airfoil blades, things that see bird strikes, and actually just go in and build up that material that gets damaged or worn and bring a part back to its original functionality.

Yeah, absolutely. Yep, you would want to do it with a, you know, a lot of these materials would be sensitive to environment, but you'd put it into the printer. They would be able to be located in unique environments or, yeah, even on an aircraft carrier system.

There are talks to that. There are versions of what we call DED instead of maybe the powder, we'd use wire where you would not be limited to gravity functions, right? So powder is going to be more uncontained. But if you were working within systems that did have gravity functionality or some level that you could control some of that direction and weight of the material, yes, it would be something at some point that would have opportunity to be multiplanetary for a technology.

Well, to do this, I wouldn't say as much as one we'd perform in space or in the sky realm. It would be more or less on a surface or on another planet. You would have to have the resources of the material as well as controlling that environment, depending if they are, you know, again, we'd want inert, we wouldn't want oxygen, you wouldn't want moisture, things that would be pertinent to that. So there would definitely be, I mean, probably a long time out before we're bringing powder printing. Like I said, wire probably has a little bit more opportunity to start addressing those and already has. I think they've done some of that, the wire definition in the space realm as of today.

There's a lot of stuff that everyone's doing that's going to be around traditional when you go to metal. Metal is harder to work with in 3D printing than plastic. You've got the forming of it, the controls over the chemistry, composition, and then you really are caring about the end result, the properties, whether it's the strength, it's fatigue life, creep, how does it handle temperature. There's a lot more that's going on the backside. So when we're looking at specifically the powder DED, you know, a lot of the components, trees and stuff we're looking at for conventional techniques that people look at or alternatives to are castings, forgings or sheet metal definition. So these are typically things you're working with large or, you know, could be medium, small sized parts too, but that you have to get a large chunk of material and you have to hog it out with machining or other techniques to get it into the shape. Where you do a casting, which you got your forms and sets to go to, and the castings are usually going to be a long lead time. So you got to go through the process to make the mold to the one part, but you're really going to want to make sure that that design's final before you get through all those steps and not having significant changes, or you start the process and all your tooling and time costs add back into it. The other side of forging, it's great to have a nice high quality material, but as soon as you start doing the machining or anything else, you're not subject to any errors that happen, changes in design, you can't put material back in. So there's a long lead time of where you're going to get the qualified material. The chunk of it has got its own standard processing testing that they go to make sure that there's no problems inside of that. A lot of these parts that we see today are usually an order of magnitude six months to a year, year and a half, and even two-year lead time components. So they're high value, they're usually regarded as going to be very critical to the functionality of some system, whether it be vehicle, engine or what have you on them. Then we also consider that they are very much needing to get the part quickly. Anymore in today's competition in manufacturing is growing. So everyone's looking to get the next part. I need my next engine design. I need my next prototype going tomorrow. And when we're having to plan those things two years back and saying there's no chances of changes, I want a little extra material or some other mishap happens, all of a sudden the time sensitivity is costly to the program. Not even just the component part, but how you're trying to do it. So a lot of things today that we're seeing, how are we replacing those technologies with speed and cost.

Yeah, I mean, to grow with some of these things, the ability to take that, I mean, you're going to lose the competition if you're not the front runner. So being able to adapt quickly, as I think we're seeing again in every realm of technology, manufacturing is how do I grab hold of what's in front of me to actually go further and quicker, faster than the competition as well as meeting my own demands. And we all know that you can run on time, rarely is anything ahead of schedule, and so even just trying to make what you think is a normal schedule is as near as possible.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that is a huge level and that's where a lot of people start with the technology. So they kind of get to their thing of usually, I'll say even to the concept of you think of an engine design. They'll have the whole thing and then they design the components. Then they step in to ask the question, how am I going to make it? And then they're going to shotgun these designs out to casting houses, forging houses, depending on which approach they want, and what can they do? And then usually they're going to be told, 'This is now X amount of time. I don't have that. What other tools could I do?' Well, I've heard of 3D printing. Let me get into that. Okay, we're going to do the prototype. Now, it's an easy sign-off for the fact that it might be, well, it's just a first part. Well, it's not flying yet. So they are quicker to then adopt that question of, well, this is at least a prototype. Let's see what we can do. So the definition usually is then brought into on a prototype side is I just need something to work tomorrow. Everything is about I need it to show what I can do, prove out the entire concept before I have to go do anything else and make sure that we're on the right page.

The adoption really, you know, it started with a lot of, you know, easy things and we got into the technology a lot of ground army. It's easy. We're not putting life at any risk. So those are things that are gone quick. And the next level of this and why, you know, space has really been one to grab hold of this because not every space flight has human life nor is it of anything else. They can actually go do a significant amount of testing, hot fire engine test before a part is actually put into production. We're also seeing a lot around defense vehicle systems, whether it be defense or aircraft systems where again we're not looking at filling up aircraft with hundreds of people yet, but that's a little bit easier things to work through the protocols on. We are at the stage though now that we are starting to integrate more towards the commercial side. The adoption has reached that level. It is obviously the hardest and longest, but when we talk about commercial flight or anything else, that is always going to be the slowest timetable. I mean, they do have usually a decade almost to some of those things before they're looking for integration. So a time of looking to a time of adoption, usually a very long runway.

Yeah, research is, I mean, there's those that are putting in what is going in the vehicles. So there's those that are creating the vehicles and those that want to use the vehicles. So we see it with both. We do a lot even with the satellite folks that are trying to go in and it's getting the proof of concept. There's working with materials that you can't deal with any other way. So now we're actually solving solutions that were never solvable to other circumstances.