Episode 22: Optimizing Ultimaker Cura slicing for function
This week, host Matt Griffin sits with Doug Kenik, VP of Product at Teton Simulation, to speak about the company and its flagship product, SmartSlice for Cura. SmartSlice, which was launched in 2020, embeds into existing slicer programs, assigning slicing parameters that make it possible to highly optimize printing time without sacrificing functional requirements. As Teton Simulation promises on its home page: “Better parts, printed faster, and with less material.”
Matt and Doug will also delve into Doug’s extensive professional background, his expertise in researching the performance of continuous strand composite materials in injection molding applications, and the trajectory of FFF technology.
Teton Simulation develops software technology that enables automatic validation and optimization of 3D print parameters to ensure performance and manufacturing requirements are met. The company’s aim is to replace the standard print-break-repeat prototyping cycle to speed up development and reduce production time and cost.
Prior to joining Teton, Doug served as Product Manager for Generative Design at Autodesk, where he helped commercialize the technology from the office of the CTO, take it through a Beta program for customer feedback, then bring it to market with a global team. Before that, he worked as a developer and application engineer at Firehole Composites. Firehole was acquired by Autodesk in 2013, and Doug was moved into Product Management.
ULTIMAKER INNOVATOR HIGHLIGHT: Stick around to meet Tom Gray of Make 48, a highlight from the 2020 Ultimaker Innovators list!
Meet our guest - Doug Kenik, VP of Product, Teton Simulation
Doug Kenik: "That's really important to understand that you have so much control over an additive process, especially around extrusion, that you can drastically change the behavior of a component just by changing two or three things, maybe one thing."
"There's a few things in the additive space that I just find so amazing. You know, I talk to people and material suppliers specifically, a few noted that this is very similar to what injection molding was like back when it started to become more mainstream. It's the openness of the community."
Matt Griffin: Hello, and welcome to Talking Additive Episode 22. In September, 2020 Teton Simulation launched a unique FFF slicing optimization tool, SmartSlice for Cura. A plugin for Ultimaker Cura. With this tool designers can assign safety requirements for loads for their parts, select performance materials right inside of Cura, and then use Teton Sim’s patent pending technology to automatically assign slicing parameters that make it possible to reduce print time by 30 to 50% without sacrificing the functional requirements. As Teton Sim promises on their homepage: "better parts, printed faster, and with less material."
This week we sit down with Doug Kenik, the Vice President of Product at Teton Simulation to talk about Teton Sim and their flagship product SmartSlice for Cura.
And through this discussion, cover Doug's background as a researcher into failure simulation with composite materials, his work as a product manager on Generative Design at Autodesk. And what he sees as the trajectory of FFF technology bundled with the assistance of increasingly sophisticated automation software, such as SmartSlice for Cura.
More on this and other topics on Talking Additive!
On Talking Additive we sit down with business leaders, innovators, and allies, to discuss the impact of adopting 3D printing in their businesses. How does adopting additive manufacturing positively benefit a business today? How is the role of 3D printing evolving within design, manufacturing, education, and our lives. And what will be possible in the future?
Welcome to the 22nd episode for the Talking Additive podcast. Talking Additive launches new episodes on Tuesdays, every two weeks.
Since 2011, Ultimaker has built an open and easy to use solution of 3D printers, software materials, and support ecosystem that enables professional designers, engineers, and manufacturers to innovate every day. Ultimaker ultimately prides itself on solutions that are flexible, productive, and scalable. It's global team of over 400 employees work together to accelerate the world's transition to local manufacturing and digital distribution.
Our guest today is Doug Kenik Vice President of Product at Teton Simulation out of Laramie, Wyoming. Doug is a product manager and entrepreneur with an expertise in software as a service, bringing innovative technologies to market in highly competitive and undefined environments.
And the interview with Doug Kenik isn't all we have for you today as always at the end of the show, stick around after the theme music for our latest Ultimaker innovators spotlight bonus segment. This one features Tom Gray, CEO and cofounder of Make48, a US-based organization that organizes 48-hour-long invention competitions that see inventors and designers create a prototype based on a given real world challenge. Make48 is a documentary series aired on PBS as well.
And now without further delay, Talking Additive's interview with Teton Simulation VP of Product, Doug Kenik.
To kick things off, why don't you tell Talking Additive guests a little bit about your background?
Doug Kenik: Yeah, sure. I'm classically trained I would call it in finite element analysis of composite materials. I spent a lot of time working on what they called progressive failure analysis of composite materials, basically just how they break and how load redistributes in structures. And that actually led me into my first career which was at a company called Firewall Composites, which was actually a spin-out of the University of Wyoming based in Laramie, Wyoming. And we worked on progressive failure analysis of composites till 2013 had large companies, aerospace companies that were trying to solve these problems. That was during a time when aerospace was transitioning into lightweight materials specifically around composites auto was trying to pick up a lot of that, which we'll talk about here in a second around injection molding, but eventually there was a company called Autodesk which I'm sure a lot of the listeners are familiar for Fusion 360 and other myriad of products. They acquired us in 2013 to really focus more on continuous fiber composites and also injection molding. And that's kind of how I started my foray into advanced materials. We'll touch probably on this a little bit later, but it's interesting how similar continuous-fiber composites are to an FFF process, just because basically like you're laying down a single road of material. And if you think about it that material has, if you pull on it in the direction that you're laying it down it has different material properties. And if you pull on it in the other direction where beads are touching each other. So that's like a continuous fiber composite, very similar. There's not like a continuous strand of composite in there, but as far as like how the material behaves very similar.
So Autodesk acquired us. And then I started working on how we link design and manufacturing specifically around injection molding. And this is where I really started to get into this whole problem of how a process influences a design because in the injection molding space you have things like fiber orientation and weld lines that are present from the manufacturing process itself. And that actually influences how the part behaves when you put it in, in service. So this is a really big problem in the automotive space where you want to try to align the fibers with the load, and you want to try to remove weld lines and get them away from the load. So we were trying to solve this problem at Autodesk for a while, and I think we were fairly successful with it. It's a really hard problem to solve. And then eventually Autodesk asked if I would lead from a product management standpoint some of the work to commercialize their generative design technology.
And that was specifically geared towards additive, which was a ton of fun. We basically took a, a whole bunch of the technology from the office of the CTO and we said, how are we going to move CAD from computer aided design more into a computer driven design where maybe a computer is more of a partner and the design. And that, that was such a fun problem to solve and we ended up taking that to market in less than a year. So I had a whole bunch of contacts in the additive space for that. And we were really more focused on the metal side than the plastic side of it. But that's where I saw this whole idea, especially for extrusion processes of how process influences performance and the generative design technologies right now there's not a lot that can really handle that, which is something that we're trying to solve here at Teton.
And there's a huge future there as we continued to push FFF into what I would call more of like a structural and industrial space. So that, that's kind of where I left off. And I then joined Teton, trying to solve the problems that we're going be talking about today. Generative design and topology optimization just lends itself naturally to additive specifically because of freedom of design. Even though, as we all know, additive definitely has limitations, right? When you're talking about like things like overhanging angles and minimum thicknesses and like whole sizes and stuff like that. So you have to tackle those kinds of things as well when you're talking about generative design and that's really where my thinking started to, specifically around extrusion and advanced materials to diverge a little bit generative design is really good for like powder-based processes. But when we start talking about things that have a lot of different parameters for the process itself like FFF, it just, it has a hard time capturing it because it doesn't understand how the product how it's made.
And that's really important I think to understand is you have so much control over an additive process, especially around extrusion that you can drastically change the behavior of a component just by changing two or three things. Maybe one thing. I said this a few times in previous lives, but there's also this idea of like generative manufacturing. I would call it where, why don't you allow your software or your computer to also help you understand how to make the component instead of what the topology should be. Because I, I think that the typology is really interesting, but at the end of the day there's also like, you got to make it, right? And so what should the parameters be? This is true for injection molding. It's true for additive. It's true for composites, right? But it, it should come in at some point and say, this is how I would suggest that you make this component. And that would be a true generative solution in my mind, especially linking the two, we've decided to tackle this problem. I would call it from the manufacturing side more than from the design side right now.
Let's solve manufacturing questions, not just topology questions
Matt Griffin: The generative tools, uh, out there in the past have you maybe picked up on ways to help you create a typology that is, is going to help you address the loads and be confident that you're going to meet the engineering properties that you set out to, but then if you have that typology and you don't have the route to produce it solved, then there's that whole other step of how to implement that. It seems like you've cut through that. And you're actually solving as you're saying, the manufacturing question of how do you respond to those goals and exactly how you put the material down? I think it's really incredibly useful interesting. And it helps eliminate a stage where a lot of people struggle. Okay, we have this design, we, we have, we've decided through our analysis that, that this works and how do we make it?
Doug Kenik: Yeah, exactly. An additive is, it's still a fairly young industry i- uh, when you take a step back and it's going through a huge transformation and it's been accelerated in the past couple of years. There's this part of it where you sit down with your printer and you say, okay, what do I need to do to get what I wanted out the back end? And that's a good problem to have, because that means that you as a user have so much control over the situation. And it's awesome. And these are things where like slicers come in, right? So OEMs and other companies, they've started building slicers to say, let's help you understand how you can make this component and what that means. And that's been tremendous, right? Now, you can start tweaking things, you can understand what impacts, what you get out on the back end.
And we really just want to take that a step further. Let's automate it, but that's really the end goal of it is tell us what you want out the back and we're gonna help the slicer automate this process for you so that you get at the end of the day, what you want. And maybe it's not the first time. Hopefully it's the first time. Maybe it's the second or third time. It's just making sure that users are successful.
Matt Griffin: Talk about your journey from focused on advanced materials, advanced manufacturing processes, to coming to explore FFF and this huge world of more accessible technology and, and, and approaching the problems there
Doug Kenik: Moving over into additive from I would call it injection molding through that generative design process, that was, it was eye-opening is what I'll call it. There's a few things in the additive space that I just find so amazing. You know, when I talked people on material suppliers specifically a few noted that this is very similar to what injection molding was like back when it started to become more mainstream. It's the openness of the community. That was the, the largest eye-opener for me was in general material suppliers are so willing to work with you. OEMs are so willing to work with you. Eventually, it's gonna be about driving profit, but right now it's just, how do we make this a viable solution for users and how do we drive value for users? That was, to me that was such a great thing to, to jump into.
There's never a no in a lot of other things that I was working on around composites, uh, and injection molding there's a lot of nos or that there's something already there, which is good, right? There's a whole bunch of revenue [laughs] driven from those kinds of applications. I get it, but addictive is very different. And I, I think open-source software had something to do with this and hardware, which we'll definitely get into around Ultimaker. But it's also just that it's such a young industry and people are just, everyone's just walking around trying to figure out what is the path forward. A- a- and it's really just about sharing that journey. That was great. I'm moving into additive. I love that. And then FFF, what's so great about it is the barrier to entry is so low. That's what I really liked about it. It doesn't matter who you are, you can typically enter the FFF space and you can start dabbling and playing with it.
I actually got started in FFF through Autodesk. Uh, they basically just gave us a printer when they acquired us. They put it in our office and said, have fun. You guys are gonna need to know about this eventually because Autodesk was heavily invested in additive manufacturing. So we started playing with it. I actually, I started making drones 'cause I was really interested in do it yourself drone applications. I would say that's when I first realized that I had no idea what I was doing with extrusion based processes 'cause I'd make the drone and I'd fly it and it would break every time. It wasn't stiff enough, it wasn't strong enough. The materials at the time were still... This was years ago, they were still pretty young.
I remember putting a drone in the back of my car once and I came back 20 minutes later and it melted on the seat [laughs]. I was like, I, I just go print a new one, which is amazing. But at the same time, I'm like, why can't I get this thing to work? [laughs] so yeah, I'd call that the journey in FFF in, uh, the most eye-opening thing to used in the community.
Matt Griffin: What problems were you looking to target when developing SmartSlice for Cura in specific?
Doug Kenik: Originally, I would say it just started out as, I call it as printed behavior. When the part comes off the build plate, how does it perform? If I were going to push or pull on it or twist it, what's it gonna do? Is it gonna break? Is it going to move too much? Is it not gonna move enough? Those are all open questions. And they're very hard to answer unless you have a lot of knowledge printing, right? So that's the first thing that we wanted to answer for users is after you print it and you put it in service and let's call it an industrial application, it doesn't have to be an industrial application, is it gonna do what you think it's gonna do or what's required of it? So that was one.
And then we started looking at how many parameters influence as printed performance? And we thought to ourselves, it'd be really nice if we could automate this. If a user could tell us what they want it to do, and we could tell you how to tune your parameters or how to set your parameters in order to get it done correctly the first time. So let's say that those are the problems that we were trying to solve.
What we can learn about FFF "as-printed behavior"
Matt Griffin: To look at that first one, as printed behavior. This is one that comes up a lot where engineers want to really understand the results of what they're doing and they can subject the topology to analysis software. But typically the analysis software material packages will, uh, treat it as a material with maybe the characteristics of the base polymer and, and-
Doug Kenik: Mm-hmm [affirmative].
Matt Griffin: ... not as printed. And you look at the material sheets and you get similar situation. So this seems like quite an opportunity.
Doug Kenik: Yeah, absolutely. There's software out there that can take these into account right on I would call it like a post slicer environment. But yeah, in general when you're designing these types of extrusion based, you know, models or geometries you don't have an opportunity to understand quickly how it will behave after it's printed. Uh, a lot of people do just assume it's isotropic. And by isotropic basically what you're saying is if I have a cube of material it doesn't matter which direction I pull on it, it will respond the same. So I'll pull on it a certain amount and then it will return to that shape with the same amount of fo- what we call force replacement or whatever that is. So you can imagine like a cube steel isotropic, but when you start printing things, let's say I printed a cube and I just oriented the raster in a certain direction.
And I printed that cube, yo- you can pull on it in a direction. Let's say you pull on a direction that you pu- that you printed it and then you pull on it in the direction that you didn't print it. Like the 90 degree direction. It doesn't behave the same. So if I pulled on it with 10 pounds in each direction it will move differently. And so assuming that it's isotropic is, I'm not gonna say it's a bad assumption. Like there's a whole bunch of engineering that gets done by doing that. But when you really want to get down into, well, let's say this thing can only displace five millimeters that assumption breaks down. So yo- you'd need to understand, hey, if I print it this way it behaves this way and it's not intuitive at all [laughs].
Matt Griffin: I, I would say these challenges are coming up for, for our customers more and more lately with the rise in use for everything from manufacturing aids other functional parts that really the rise of function as being the main goal in parallel with the arrival of all these composite materials to this space. So it's exciting that the two opportunities that are s- considered separate problem spaces to a lot of users, what material do I select and what are the properties you can get out of choosing that material and what are the sizing parameters and, and how do I attune to really get the function I'm intending you bring those spaces together.
Doug Kenik: Absolutely. You can basically virtually qualify a material, right? 'Cause not, not all users have access to all materials, but if you virtually have access to materials that opens up a lot of space for you. Right now you can say, you can start doing what if scenarios? What if I had that material that's really powerful? 'Cause then you can qualify it and say, yeah, I have confidence in this material. I'm gonna buy it because that's gonna solve my problem. Same thing around sizing parameters. You know, it's interesting that we're talking about as additive becomes more and more ingrained, especially extrusion based into these industrial processes where load and structure is starting to come to the forefront. You had Job, I think was on episode 13 from ERIKS-
Matt Griffin: Yep.
Doug Kenik: : And he mentioned that, and that was, it made my eyes light up because sometimes I feel as Teton that we're a little bit ahead of the market, but then we hear stories like this and we say, okay, yeah, we're solving a problem. We see it coming and it's, I'm glad that we're in the position that we're in and that we can provide value here now.
Matt Griffin: I think a lot of the material companies featured with solutions in your system are probably pretty excited about it, just simply for that idea of qualifying solutions in there, because there are now suddenly some really great performance materials, but not a lot of opportunities to really e- evaluate which to pick out of the many options. Now in 3D printing, there's still not as many options as injection molding, where you have thousands of grades, of every type of material. There's a lot more granularity and choice. But with the recent explosion this is a huge benefit to identifying functional solutions. There was a note in the SmartSlice for Cura page that, you know, modern slicers have a staggering number of print parameters giving you nearly complete control over how a part is printed. So you have this as an option, but then you also have the challenge that really s- slicing optimization to the nth degree is considered kind of a dark art. It's a very steep learning curve, a lot of counterintuitive elements.
In fact, one of the things that, you know, that Ultimaker has learned very happily from collaborating with material partners who are using tools that we, we provide to them to help them create print parameters to Sim to make it much easier for, you know, those using the machines to have a good first experience, is that a lot of the choices that the, uh, polymer companies have made are counter-intuitive and are not what we would expect it even down to the chemistry of how polymers relax and that kind of thing. What has it been like stepping into this whole mess of processes and interdependencies and provide a tool that, that bridges?
Doug Kenik: It's been amazing. A- and I go back to the openness of the community as to why it's been so amazing. The willingness to work together to drive value to users li- that's where it is. So there's a myriad of space of parameters. Luckily we have technology now where we can start doing virtual DOEs design of experiments and understand what influences what, we can pick out the outliers of which have the greatest influence. Material suppliers I'm sure they do this too. When they start tuning all of the various like chemical formulation slice parameters, you can just do a design of experiments and understand that the biggest contributors I would say to the end product are the end goals. And that's what you can start tweaking. We have to build confidence. You want material suppliers to suggest something, and you want Cura to suggest something to say, this is what we would do, right?
Because there's a level of just safe there and it's the same thing with SmartSlice. We're not telling you what the answer is. We're telling you a list of suggested answers to say, this is the direction that will probably yield in the highest success of what you want to do. So a lot of it is just confidence building at that point. So going, going back, you to the question about challenges of navigating space, or how has it been it's just, I look at it like a fun problem that the community is solving together. And when you're doing those types of exercises usually they end in success which I have a high degree of confidence that will be the end state of this.
NEWS - Attend Talking Additive's “Transform advanced use cases with Ultimaker ecosystem partners” session at the Ultimaker Transformation Summit, April 20-23, 2021
Matt Griffin: We'll return to learn more about the core technology work under the hood in SmartSlice for Ultimaker Cura when we get back.
This is Matt Griffin, host of Talking Additive Ultimaker's 3D printing podcast. Talking Additive is pleased to announce that our team will be participating in the first ever Ultimaker Transformation Summit on April 20th to 23rd.
Unlock the magic of transformative innovation at the Ultimaker Transformation Summit at be inspired by the industry leaders making it happen. Talking Addictive will not have an episode that week because I and my fellow Talking Additive producers will be presenting the conference taking place within this virtual open house environment. To experience the technology of tomorrow today and to spend time with the Talking Additive team live and chat and onscreen register for your spot soon.
You can sign up at https://3d.ultimaker.com/summit.
Ultimaker's staff from around the world will be joining for the event, which will kick off with a special presentation by our guests from episode 21, CEO Jürgen Von Hollen.
You can also hear Doug Kenik guest of this episode in conversation with Thiago Medeiros from Ultimaker material partner LEHVOSS Group in the fourth session of the conference presented by the Talking Additive team: "Transform advanced use cases with Ultimaker ecosystem partners."
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We will now return to our interview with Doug Kenik, VP of Product for Teton Simulation.
Core technology at the heart of SmartSlice for Cura
Matt Griffin: How would you describe the core technology that you're drawing on to be able to do this work?
Doug Kenik: Yeah. So the core technology of SmartSlice is something called finite element analysis. That's a weird mechanical engineering term. I can, I'll boil it down as much as I can, but it's basically a virtual simulation. So if you were to go test a component like hang a weight from it, it's basically virtually doing that, right? So it relies on math and some sort of a representation of that geometry whatever that representation is to tell you how that part will behave. Finite element analysis has been deeply ingrained in a whole bunch of different industries, and we've basically taken that concept and tailored it specifically for extrusion based processes. So now we can accurately describe the, as printed geometry, and now we understand how it behaves in a virtual test.
And we can do that in seconds which I think is probably the most powerful aspect of our, one of those powerful aspects of our technology is it is so fast. It gives you answers literally anywhere from 30 seconds to minutes, which is way less than a print time, right? Because in general let's say that you were gonna go virtually simulate something. And it took just as long to do that as it would to print and test it physically. There's no reason to run [laughs] to run the virtual simulation, I, I, but it's true, right? Why would you want a computer telling you what it thinks the answer is gonna be when you know the answer. So being able to quickly iterate in your software package of, of choice like in Cura that's powerful. So that's the core really, and there's a whole bunch of IP entangled in there that we really can't talk about, but that's that. And then what we've also done I, I'd say a really good job of is wrapping optimization algorithms around it.
However you wanna describe an optimization algorithm. Some people call them machine learning things, which maybe they are, otherwise you can ta- call them like Monte Carlo simulation or something like that. We built an optimization engine that wraps around that finite element solver that basically you can think of it as like, just assume some sort of crazy surface. It basically just crawls around the surface. And when it finds a point on that surface that satisfies what you need. And with a combination of all these different slice parameters, it tells you these slice parameters really like they provide a result which you had requested. And then it continues crawling until it finds a different point. And it says, oh, this one does too, right? Because this isn't like a, in, if you crawled around forever on that surface you would eventually find the point that is the exact best solution for what it knows about. And that's, that's an interesting thing, 'cause a computer only knows so much, right?
Like you, as an engineer or ma- manufacturing engineer you have different requirements. Like maybe there's like a center of mass requirement, or maybe there's like a thermal thing. The computer doesn't understand all of it. And what we're trying to do is when we built this optimization engine is tell you, hey, we found this point it meets what we know that you need, you decide what you wanna do with it. And we'll give you like 10 of those points. And then you, as you, as an engineer, or even as a designer you get to decide yo- what you think is the best. So again, like we go back to suggestions.
Matt Griffin: So there are new features that have rolled out with a new version. It seems like it would be good to cover some of those things, because I don't know how many of the listeners have had chance to take a look at this yet.
Doug Kenik: Absolutely. Yeah. We'll start by reiterating what the intent of the software is. And then what we heard from customers and how we met those criteria. First and foremost, again, confidence. We, we just want to provide valuable information thumbs up, thumbs down is the as printed part gonna behave the way that you intend it to? And then secondly, we wanna be able to optimize slice parameters to tell you to meet those criteria, right? By minimizing print time and material usage. That's what we're all about right now. And as we were talking to our customers and potential customers we found that there were a lot of open questions. For example, let's say I optimize a component and your solution comes back and tells me that there is no feasible way that I can print this thing. And it will [laughs] behave as, as I wanted it to. This is a very real scenario, right?
Like some parts just, it doesn't matter you can print them solid they will not behave the way that you intended them to, or that you want, that's okay. But then the question is, what do I do? [laughs] it's like I, I, obviously I need to modify the geometry or I can change the material, right? And this is what we've been talking about is that you can now virtually like qualify materials within the software. So we added a whole bunch of materials to the materials database, high-performance materials. So now users can actually go virtually qualify materials from a host of material suppliers that are all hosted on the marketplace by the way, in the Cura marketplace which is great. Because all you have to do is just go download these materials and run it and it'll tell you how they perform.
Uh, and will, and now we also can tell you as a user i- where in the geometry something's going wrong and, and that's really impactful because now we can come back, we can highlight a region of the geometry in this new release. And we can tell you, this portion of the geometry is causing you the issues you need to modify your geometry right here. And this goes back to this idea of design for additive manufacturing. A lot of people call it DfAM. I for extrusion based processes that's a very difficult thing to do unless you have the sliced part in front of you. And once you get the slice part in front of you and the as printed behavior DfAM becomes a very real thing. And that's the step that we've taken more from the manufacturing side, we're, now we're indicating to you change this portion of geometry you can slice it the same way, you're probably gonna see better results. So that's like the thing I am most excited about with this new release.
We've also added what I would call like a sanity check. So it's funny because users, you set up a problem in SmartSlice and there's this whole idea of a use case which is what is happening in service, right? Like where am I fixing the structure in space and how am I pushing or pulling on it? It's not always 100% intuitive. There's a little bit of thinking that has to go into it. But then let's say you set it up and you run it. The question is, is it moving the way I thought it was gonna move? I don't know. So, so we added this what I would call sanity check where you run one of these validations and then you can ask it, hey, how does this thing move? And it'll plot on the part, it'll show you how the part moves. And then you can say, yep, that's exactly what it does in service. Let's go optimize this component because now I'm confident that I have this problem set up the way that it should be set up.
So I'd say those are the things that I'm most excited about. We received some really good feedback from the customer base on it.
Matt Griffin: When I head back to the origin of SmartSlice for Ultimaker Cura, so what drew you as a team to developing for Ultimaker Cura as a platform?
Doug Kenik: Yeah. So this is a really interesting story. We actually started out developing our own web-based slicer, and the reason that we were doing it is because we needed somewhere to showcase our technology. I- we, we really hadn't explored the realm of slicers at this point we didn't know what was completely out there, we just knew that we needed something to demonstrate our technology. And we quickly found out that there are a lot of slicers on the market and everyone has their slicer of choice. So breaking in with a new slicer saying it's gonna solve all your problems it's just, it's a non-starter right? So that was shelved that and said, we'll revisit that at some later date, but I was wandering around a AMUG conference in Chicago.
I think it was like three years ago and I went to the session and, um, I'm sure most of your listeners have heard of Paul Heiden he is be- he used to be your VP of, of Product Management or product at Ultimaker. He's actually sits on our board right now. He's an amazing person. If you don't know Paul you should definitely look him up on LinkedIn. He's an interesting guy. He was chairing a session on materials in, at AMUG. And this was probably one of the most heated discussions I've ever seen at an additive conference. And, and for those of you who haven't gotten into the whole open versus closed ecosystem materials discussion yet, you need to go sit in on one of these discussions because it just li- there i- it's not really I sit in the middle camp present, it's very bifurcated. So Paul was, was chairing this and he was doing a great job moderating it.
And I went up to Paul afterwards and I told him that we were working on and he said, sounds extremely interesting. Here's my email address, give me a ring. So I [laughs] we reached out to Paul and we schedule some time with him. And, uh, Roger is the product manager for Cura and showed them what we were up to in that web-based slicer. And they said, "This is exactly what we were looking for. We want you guys to integrate this into Cura." So that was the start of it. And then we started looking at it more and one of the great things about Ultimaker is you're open source. So it's very easy to work with Cura. And it was very easy to get the product off the ground because the partnership it was great that the partnership was moving forward and everyone was interested. We actually, Brady and I flew out to the Netherlands and visited the company and had a discussion with everyone which was amazing, great place. And your offi- your new office is amazing by the way.
So we went out there [laughs] and talk to everyone. We started developing in Cura because we didn't have to wait for a formal partnership. We could say, let's get this thing off the ground as fast as possible and for a startup time is everything. So it was hugely advantageous for us to move forward with it.
Matt Griffin: I was at that AMUG session. I-
Doug Kenik: Yeah.
Matt Griffin: ... I remember that very, very well. And I, I had, for example, a couple of the people who were speaking there have now been on talking about it including Haleyanne Freedman who threw through a pretty big gauntlet down in the middle of that with her basically saying yeah, closed source, that seems really weak and like a very bad decision [laughs]-
Doug Kenik: [laughs].
Matt Griffin: I was fre- I'm really glad that that struck a chord and got you interested.
The role of advanced materials for functional parts
Matt Griffin: Fast forwarding to now you not only have this solution developed to be deployed through Ultimaker Cura, but you can benefit from a huge list of material Alliance partners who are aggressively bringing these composite materials in. Do you wanna talk a little bit about how you approach materials and especially with your huge background in thinking about composites of every sort, looking at what's happening in the FFF space now, during these still wild pioneering days.
Doug Kenik: The materials ecosystem right now is, I look at it like a, like a plasma almost like it's just continually morphing. And it's so interesting. We can actually draw a lot of corollaries back to injection molding believe it or not, where the hardware outpaces everything. And as soon as the hardware starts to become not solidified repeatable enough to give you a good answer or a good solution which we're at, it definitely, but we're at a material starts to catch up. And we're seeing this, where you start to introduce all of these different materials and materials start evolving. You start generating a whole bunch of new materials with structural applications because now we're starting to get into the structural side of this and then software. I, I don't say it lags behind, but it's always the last to the party. It comes in and says, okay, this is about efficiency at the end of the day.
And working with these materials suppliers and like how we approach it, it comes back to the openness of the community. I, I can't tell you how amazing it is to work with these material suppliers. Like, you don't even have to go through like a courting pro- I'll call it a co- put that in records, like a courting process, right? There's no such thing. You talk with each other you say what you're doing, what you're up to and they say absolutely, we're gonna ship you some material, test it and try it out. And we just test it for them. So they gave us a list of this is how we would print it and this is our recommended print profile in Cura, so we print it that way. And then we put it in a tensile machine and we generate data and we ship that data with the software product and it's accessible for users.
The data means something special to us because we reverse engineer it. And so that we can cross a myriad of slicing parameters, but if users have access to it, we didn't really have to have a strategy with material suppliers, which I found extremely interesting from like previous life experiences. It's been more of just how do we push this together forward? On our website we have some great case studies with BASF and also Polymaker that we released probably like a month and a half ago. I would recommend yo- you check them out as listeners just about how good these materials are. And by good I mean, stiff and strong. The amount of innovation that have gone into some of these materials for structural application is mind boggling. Like how much you introduced like fibers to these things, how much stiffness and strength you can drive out of an FFF component it's insane, like matching aluminum insane, which is that's very powerful.
You'll also see coming up in the virtual open house a discussion with another material supplier where we've done some other work where you'll see this highlighted as well. It's so great to see how we can innovate with material and hardware to push into these industrial applications and software is just there to make it that much better.
Matt Griffin: Speaking of the jigs and fixtures and manufacturing aid space, i- it's been interesting talking with a lot of customers who, uh, particularly in like context, like automation, context, like packaging, et cetera. They have found that by really understanding this materials and learning how to work with them, they can replace aluminum and steel parts all the time. And the new polymer ones they, they may not look like very fancy parts, but they out perform the original parts or at least in the case of, of some of the things you don't necessarily need everything to be a steel part for, as far as the energy taken from the world to make that part. So, so that has been quite a transformation.
Doug Kenik: Yeah. It comes back to advanced materials and it touches on the education aspect. And then it also touches on something that's really interesting. We'll probably dive into this later, which is the digital warehouse and what I would call distributed manufacturing, which there's a couple of aspects here on these assembly lines timed down on an assembly line that equates to however many dollars that you wanna say equates to depending on your industry or your company, but a lot. And if you can print something and get your line up and running that much faster, there's a huge business proposition. And so additive in general has a huge benefit to these companies and SmartSlice hasn't been added I would call it benefit to these companies where we can increase the efficiency or reduce the time, which equates again to the dollars saved. So I think that's really interesting. And then when we start talking about distributed manufacturing where you don't have overhead of storing components anymore, you can pull what I would call like a qualified file and print it at your site when you need it. The business impacts to that are just mind boggling, right?
Matt Griffin: Yeah. Looking at some of the examples on your site and some of the case studies that, that have come up and yo- you see a tendency where there, there'll be a result that takes, you know, a, a fraction more time to produce than like a kind of a basic quick draft version of something. But because of the slicing has been optimized for the needs for that part, the performance actually might match or exceed some of the knee-jerk kind of overcompensation approaches like printing at 100% infill, that kind of thing. Just because you're scared it's gonna break, so you're just gonna print the hell out of it. And you're gonna add like a couple of days to that print, talk to Talking Addictive listeners about how this process works, to get you to that optimized part?
Doug Kenik: It's really about automation at the end of the day, but s- there, there's kinda two words that I, I keep repeating, but confidence and automation. In Cura you can just pose the question, this is what I need from a stiffness and a strength component. And the software just quickly tells you thumbs up, thumbs down the way that you've designed it, the slicing parameters that you have, the material that you've chosen, the orientation [laughs] on the build plate, like we can keep going, but it'll quickly give you yep, yes or no. And it'll tell you why and we'll provide suggestions as to what you should do. That's step one, that's the whole confidence aspect of it.
And then step two would say help me. And so you click the optimized button or the help me button. And it says, okay, I'm gonna go help you and it will go out and explore that surface, crawl around that surface that I was talking about previously trying to find the best suited slicing parameters to meet what you had requested of it while minimizing print time and material usage. And it'll come back and say, this is what I recommend. And not just one, like 10, right? And there's a whole bunch of value here when we start talking about, oh, let's just go back to the assembly line, an example, or even just a single component example, when you need to get something up and running where you're right, like either A, you're iterating. So you'll print something it'll break. These are that print break cycles that we're talking about. Let's just say you do it five times. How much time have you wasted in that? You've wasted at least the print time, plus the time putting it into service and it breaking. And then you redesigning it.
Whereas if you can do it once with our software or twice let's call it with our software, you've saved 50% at least of the time required to get that assembly line back up and going or print that component for structural application, which has a large business application and business value to it as well as the whole confidence aspect of it. So that's one. And then the other that we see quite often is what you had mentioned where users, if there's a structural application users will just say, I am gonna print this thing solid. I don't want to mess with it, I like, it is the best that I can possibly do. It's the stiffest and the strongest and you are right. It is the stiffest and strongest part for that geometry that you could create. Um, besides if you swap material or maybe a material orientations or something like that. But yeah, we see this often, but our software will actually go in and tell you, this is over-designed i- it'll tell you that. It'll say it's over-designed do you want us again to optimize the size parameters so that we can meet these requirements, it will go in and do it.
And what we've typically seen is a reduction of anywhere from 30 to 50% in print time for a single component. So the single component is massive in itself, but when you have to print 40 of those, the time [laughs] savings and the business value is just, i- it's so great. So it's like we're compounding the benefits that additive provides to these users and driving more value out of the process itself, which I, I think is pretty interesting.
Matt Griffin: I really liked that. I, I liked that.
Brake lever case study with BASF carbon-reinforced nylon
Matt Griffin: Do you wanna cover any of the case studies?
Doug Kenik: We don't have any like customer labeled case studies that we can share. There's a lot of confidentiality that's wrapped up in a whole bunch of that, but we can talk about the BASF Case Study, uh, or the Polymaker Case Study. I, I tend, I, I'll just go with the BASF one, just because I have a lot more familiarity with it at this point. But basically we had this challenge would be BASF to design a brake lever. And i- those of you familiar with brake levers like on your bike, there's a stiffness requirement, right? Because you don't want to mash down on the brake lever and it like moves. You don't want the component itself displacing because then you think you're breaking and you're not breaking. You're not pulling on anything, which isn't good. And there's like a strength side of it where, u- if you push, if you pull too hard you don't want the brake lever to snap. So [laughs] we were 3D printing this part and we had some requirements for it around stiffness and strength.
And we started out with just I will call it like a generic ABS material. And it, we came back with the ABS material and SmartSlice said it doesn't matter how you print this component. You're not gonna be able to get the, the structural response that you need out of it, which that's okay. Just the material at the end of the day, we can start looking at other materials and that's when BASF came in and they said, "Why don't you try this carbon reinforced material that we've been working on? And we'll sh- we'll highlight what we can do with it." And this material is super stiff and super strong. So we put it into the system and it was basically over-designed. Yo- you could print it solid, it would work. You could print it like, you mean, it was like 40% infill, that would probably where it was. It was crazy.
So, so the question is like, how can I optimize this thing to get the most structural performance out of it with the minimum material use and print time, we went through that exercise with SmartSlice and came up with an optimized component. And then we actually printed all of them and BASF tested them. So they actually hooked up like an experimental test rig and started pushing and pulling on these things. And then we blindly ran SmartSlice while they were printing and testing and correlated [laughs] the results. And it was great. I think we were within like 10% on stiffness and then the strength values we could get. I think we were really close on the strength values as well, but from the stiffness driving side it was, we were really happy with the results. I think BASF was too, they wrote a, a white paper on it. It's hosted on their website. Luckily they allowed us to show it on our website too BASF is great to work with by the way.
Yeah. From like an engineering aspect side of it that highlights what we're capable of doing. And then there's also the business side of it where we've been, like I indicated we've been working with customers, things like jigs and fixtures on assembly lines where we can reduce print time anywhere from 30 to 50%. And the business implications of that are just they're really big. Uh, so I think the customer base has been pretty satisfied so far.
Matt Griffin: You had mentioned listening to episode 13 of Talking Additive-
Doug Kenik: Yeah.
Matt Griffin: ... and hearing Job talk about some of the projects that ERIKS and some of the approaches that they now have to the larger life cycle of industrial parts. One thing that he brought up that I thought was quite interesting is that they're now pushing for when their customers are making the industrial parts that may someday be the kind of thing that they need to help them solve problems with. They're actually saying, why don't you design this part from the beginning to be suitable to additive manufacturing, reason being that you can print it in the lead up to being confident that it's time to do a lot of them, but also at the end of the process when you're done doing mass, uh, production of that part you wanna be able to get them when you need it and, and not have a redesign. And that was really illuminating to me 'cause that's, from a certain perspective, you might think that they would just, they love the fact that manufacturers keep putting themselves in those binds of not being able to supply those parts later.
But their argument is no we're part of this. You know, th- the parts themselves are changing, the nature of what, what you're gonna produce is changing-
Doug Kenik: Mm-hmm [affirmative].
Matt Griffin: What are your thoughts about that from a SmartSlice and a Teton Sim perspective?
Doug Kenik: That part of episode 13 that was probably what struck me the most is just understanding the life cycles now of the components and how we can actually leverage additive as a new I'll call it cog and the manufacturing wheel where it an integral part, absolutely amazing and SmartSlice plays a huge role there, right? Now we can virtually validate the components on the additive side right away and say, yeah, these are good to go. From an engineering perspective you can manufacture them with additive, they're gonna perform as expected. And you've basically qualified the part material and hardware. And you can put a stamp on it, a digital file and say, these are good to go. I, I totally see in the future SmartSlice working in that context where we are helping to like version control and make sure that these parts are qualified as they're distributed to the user base.
If we look at it through a manufacturing lens, distributed manufacturing I think we brought that up earlier. That's a real thing and it should be considered heavily. So like I have a friend who owns a body shop in Northern Wyoming and the lead time on parts like you're tau- like you don't want your car on the shop that long. Like what if in the future we were able to on demand print a component for your car through a digital warehouse that your OEM has marked as good and your cars back to you in the same day, but this, I start my mind starts going crazy. This is what I think about, but these are the possibilities that digital unlocks for us.
Challenges Doug Kenik would like FFF to tackle as a technology
Matt Griffin: What are some challenges that you would like to see FFF as a technology tackling in the, the near and distant future?
Doug Kenik: From the process itself I think we've gone a long ways on repeatability, really interested to make sure that we continue working on that problem. I think that comes back to the whole confidence aspect and trust aspect of this which I, I think we were really good about it with a single machine, like repeatability on machines really good. I'm more interested in like cross machines that if you have a distributed manufacturing what, what you get out of one, you want out of every other one. So some of that might be like hardware innovation. Some of that might be software innovations to be quite honest with you, you could have like live print monitoring, you can have data collection, you can have a whole bunch of other stuff that are going on. So I'd really like to see some of that be broached and then FFF in general just continue to drive into production level components.
There's so much room there for FFF to grow. And this goes again with confidence and trust, but as that continues to evolve and as materials evolve, I really would like to see FFF go into like mainstream production level components. And not even low volume I think there's opportunity there for higher volume. And through we start, we're starting to see some companies drive towards that direction. So more innovation in that area would be just awesome. And I, I think that it can have such a large impact and disrupt a lot of traditional processes out in the market today.
Matt Griffin: So Doug where can a user who's interested check out, uh, SmartSlice for Cura?
Doug Kenik: SmartSlice is actually in the Cure marketplace, uh, both in base Cura and Cura enterprise which is packaged with a Ultimaker Essentials. So you can download it via the marketplace and you can register for a free trial directly in product. I, it will prompt you for a user login and password, but there's a hyperlink embedded in the login screen where you can request a free trial. And we hand out 14-day free trials for you to try it as needed. It comes packaged with tutorials and like I had mentioned previously, we, we know when something's up and you're having issues. So if you are running a job and you're having problems or getting started, we'll proactively reach out to you to make sure that we can get you on your feet as fast as possible.
Thanks for attending our show
Matt Griffin: And with that, I wanted to thank you for coming in and joining us and talking about it today. This has been an illuminating discussion of a tool that is already by participating in this ecosystem, I think really contributing to, to how some of these problems are addressed and resolved.
Doug Kenik: Yeah. I appreciate that. And I really appreciate you having me on, it's been again, a very interesting discussion and it's been a pleasure.
Matt Griffin: Thank you. We hope that you have enjoyed our 22nd episode for the Talking Additive Podcast optimizing Ultimaker Cura slicing for function Doug Kenik, VP of Product Teton Simulation. Stick around after the theme music for our Ultimaker innovator spotlight featuring Tom Gray of Make48, a nationwide 48-hour-invention competition, also a documentary airing on PBS in the USA. And as a reminder, make sure to register now to attend the Ultimaker Transformation Summit on April 20th to 23rd, where you have the opportunity to see CEO Jürgen Von Hollen announce to the world his vision for the new era for Ultimaker and also catch the conference program produced by the Talking Additive team. That includes past talking out of guests such as Doug Kenik from Teton Sim, Terri-Ann dela Cruz and Jeremy Evers from Ultimaker the LEHVOSS Group and Tobias Ronald Meyer from BASF. Unlock the magic of transformative innovation at the Ultimaker Transformation Summit and be inspired by the industry leaders making it happen. Sign up at 3d.ultimaker.com/summit.
If you have questions about any topics covered during this episode of Talking Addictive we invite you to post on Twitter or LinkedIn to #TalkingAdditive, all one word. In three weeks special one week delay on April 27th we will return with episode 23, featuring the dynamic educator Caroline Keep, Director of Spark Penketh and cofounder of Liverpool MakeFest. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts and join the conversation by signing up for news and announcements at talkingadditive.com. Thank you again to Doug Kenik, Keith Ozar and the rest of the Teton Simulation team for their help and support with episode 22. Our series producer is Rana Gabriel Taquini, studio manager David Roberson, executive producer, Nuno Campos, music and episode sound mix by Bryan Scary and Giulio Carmassi of HUMMINGBIRDS custom music and sound. I am host and producer Matt Griffin and thank you for listening.
ULTIMAKER INNOVATOR SPOTLIGHT - Tom Gray of Make48
Matt Griffin: Psst wait, don't leave now.
In Talking Additive episode 18 we introduced a recent project that is near and dear to our hearts. The Ultimaker innovators list. If you haven't yet had a chance to explore this online project, head over to ultimaker.comforward/innovators. To see the list that we unveiled on December 15th, 2020. This project will be an ongoing Ultimaker wide effort to put the spotlight on individuals or groups across the world who we believe are using 3D printing to transform the way people work, think and live. Throughout the year we will return to this list to highlight more of these Ultimaker innovators interviews. As we advance our way towards the launch of our 2021 innovators list at the end of the year.
Today our innovator spotlight falls upon Tom Gray and Make48 at nationwide 48-hour invention competition and documentary series that airs on PBS across the United States. These competitions make use of a variety of tools, materials, and workspaces among them 3D printers. And this project has done much to highlight the value of 3D printing technology as a ready at hand tool for invention from early concepts to technical studies, to mock ups, to ergonomic tests, to stages of manufacturing all the way from proof of concept through to replacement parts. Without further ado, Tom Gray.
Tom Gray: My name is Tom Gray, and I am the CEO and co-founder of Make48. It's simply a 48-hour invention competition where we challenge teams to build a physical prototype. These are the technologies available at a maker space and very talented tool techs to help them build whatever they can think of. My first, uh, encounter with 3D printing was before Make48, I used to be in the product development world. I would license inventions, I usually low technology stuff. You're talking gardening, kitchen items, that kind of thing. And very much the rapid prototyping and vendors would bring me half baked ideas that they were shelf ready, but not quite shelf ready. And as you know, when you're launching your product, that's when you find faults with anything. And instead of us going back to the old fashioned way and tooling up and doing it that expensive concept, we started to do some 3D printing using a, a couple of companies that I'd known who were professionals in the industry.
In my opinion, innovation is improving on something that usually is already existing. It's a very broad word that could go across a number of things. Innovation to me is very different than the word invention, where invention to me feels like you've got to create something brand new that doesn't exist. And that's very confusing for a lot of people and very daunting to think that you've got to invent something new. Innovation is, is a coffee cup. We wanna improve it, we wanna improve the design and the consumer experience and something like that. So in my opinion, it's all about improving other items that already exist and making them better for the world. At first and foremost Matt, I'm not making myself. I'm on the other side of the whole spectrum. I'm part of the everyday consumer that has ideas that does not know how to physically or even digitally make them a reality.
Yeah, that's why we Make48 really blossomed with Rich, Cult, Bob and myself was that let's teach people how to get that idea out of the head and into their hands and show them the processes that are available whether it's CAD design work, whether it's digital fabrication, old fashioned making with a wood or metal. And during the events we have these challenges and criteria. So we don't tell the contestants what they have to build, it's, there's a problem within this industry and how would you solve it and here's the things we want you to see at the end of the day. And sure enough, we have nine 3D printers available to use. Yeah, just the ones that we bring to the competition, let alone the ones that the maker space may have, but that first initial prototyping and testing has to be usually be a 3D printer.
You don't wanna weld something up. You don't want to be doing massive woodworking or even CNC routing early in the game because you sort of wanna test your product. And what we find is that the 3D printing and the quality of those 3D printers i- Improving year after year meanings, a faster result. And when you've got 48 hours, you've been to one of these Matt, there's not much time for error that you wanna test and fail quickly. And that's why 3D printing is such a big factor for what we do. And the 3D printers will often be running within six hours of a competition without any other machines operating. That's the thing that people go to the first. And our first event was I think 2015, and it was at the union station in Kansas City and that event it wasn't filmed back then for television. So it was a real cowboy type event. Lot of fun, safety, wasn't a big issue. It was really back yard and it was really good event.
I think three competitions later we went to the Smithsonian museum and did one there. That's where we filmed a bit of a pilot and after that got picked up and made into a major documentary which is what we are today. Moving forward and with the COVID issues, we are obviously planning a long ways ahead. We know that there's no big events happening next year, for example. So we have actually got a 10 city series gonna beginning in June of 2021, and that'll go for six months. And the winning team from Erie City will then advance to be on season five for the PBS show in March of 2022. So we're really lifting a game. We wanna include a lot more people into the competitions. Yeah. The big benefit we're also doing is that we are, got some new guidelines to pick the teams coming up. It includes a 50% female ratio, 30% from underserved areas and 30% of race diversity.
So that's going obviously down really well with our cities, because as you probably know, these competitions like first robotics and all these great competitions in STEM, which we sort of are in that same category. It's often the very kids, that had the privilege of getting the access to this equipment. There are so many people out there who have never had the chance to do this, and that's where we come in and allow anyone and everyone to compete because they're not building, they're not having to learn how to operate equipment. They have to just simply collaborate work with the makers, work with the tool techs and have this maker space full of equipment to build whatever they can dream of. Yeah. Our future's exciting for that reason and we wanna just be a lot more inclusive of everyday people to get involved in innovation.
Matt Griffin: Thank you very much for listening. On Talking Additive we hold conversations with colleagues and customers about 3D printings impact on business.