By now, we’ve all heard the battle cries for additive manufacturing (AM / 3D printing): complexity is free; mass customization is real; make anything and just hit ‘print’. Most of those are oversimplified ways to hype up the potential for a very real technology suite. While AM is increasingly coming into play for end-use parts production — especially following an uptick in real-world use cases throughout the global Covid-19 pandemic — larger-scale adoption still has a long road ahead. One young company is launching its PureForm technology as a service to scale up production AM for metal parts.
Meet Holo. The Silicon Valley company spun out from 3D software giant Autodesk
A Holo employee unloads parts from an industrial scale furnace located at Holo’s production facility ... [+]
PureForm 3D Printing Technology
Altogether, the company holds 16 patents — and another 27 patents pending — that cover PureForm printer design, binder materials, and other areas like thermal designs for AM. The key platform piece to Holo’s ambition of scale metal additive manufacturing is its PureForm technology.
PureForm is based on high-resolution TV imagers that pattern an entire plane at a time in just three seconds per layer. A proprietary metal-polymer slurry material is shaped using the company’s PureForm HD lithography printers, based on a digital light processing (DLP) 3D printing technology. Because each build is done one flash at a time for the full layer, 8-24 parts can be made in a single print job without impacting the speed. More parts will be able to fit as Holo plans to expand later this year to a larger build platform.
Resulting green parts are debinded and sintered in a standard metal injection molding (MIM) industrial furnace to create fully dense metal parts. Using a combination of solvent and thermal debinding — the latter of which occurs in the same furnace as final sintering — speeds up the finishing stages of these parts. After sintering, parts are approximately 25% smaller than the metal/polymer-mix products that came straight off the printer. Shrinkage is a known factor in this process, so the software the team uses oversizes each part to result in appropriately-sized final results based on the exact, predictable makeup of the finely-tuned feedstock material.
Those final parts have finely detailed (150-200 micron) features that require minimal post-processing — typically, only coining and polishing. The process doesn’t require the use of support structures, the removal of which is typically a time- and labor-intensive part of finishing 3D print jobs. Further, because the material used is a liquid, no depowdering is required; washing it with solvent is enough to remove excess material during the debinding stage. Use of liquid material also removes the need for other metal AM processes’ safety precautions like inert environments, clean rooms, and operator PPE.
Copper 3D Printing
A 3D printed pure copper liquid coldplate designed and manufactured by Holo. The turbulating design ... [+]
Copper, Holo notes, is the third largest materials market in the world at $170 billion. It’s also the first material this company is making available, with final parts 99.99% pure metal.
Targeting that particular materials niche is an interesting strategy for a 3D printing company. Laser powder bed (LPBF) 3D printing processes, which comprise a large segment of metal AM availability, rely on a laser(s) to fuse metal powders. Copper, though, is highly reflective and transmits heat well, making interaction with lasers to fuse copper powder tricky and prone to a not-insignificant series of issues.
Interest is rising in 3D printing copper, as creating geometrically complex parts like antennae and heatsinks could increase performance across several demanding industries. Other companies, like Australia’s SPEE3D, can 3D print copper parts without the use of lasers, but with much lower resolution for more rough-and-tumble applications like the mining industry. Recently, more companies have been working on detailed copper 3D printing capabilities not reliant on laser-based processes. Desktop Metal, Markforged, Additive Drives, Digital Metal, and Xact Metal, for example, have all recently introduced finer capabilities with this material.
What sets Holo’s approach to copper 3D printing is its focus on accessible scale production. This team isn’t looking to occasionally create one-off interesting copper parts every so often. The company’s 20,000-square-foot Bay Area production facility has the capacity for tens of thousands of customer parts on a monthly basis.
Inside Holo
To better understand what’s happening in Holo, CEO Hal Zarem, PhD, and Chief Strategy Officer, President, and Co-Founder Arian Aghababaie, PhD shared more insights into the company’s capabilities and strategies.
These two executives’ backgrounds inform a lot of the overall Holo strategy. Zarem, with a “background running startups in Silicon Valley in the materials, hardware, and devices space,” says that “what Holo does is very natural to me.” His leadership will guide the young company’s path, and that background in scaling up Silicon Valley startups will be key. For Aghababaie’s part, a decade of experience in the AM space has included work on DLP/SLA 3D printing technology. “What we’re doing at Holo is an extension of that technology, extending from polymer to metal,” he noted. Autodesk had acquired his former company in 2014 to focus on that work, eventually introducing the short-lived but ambitious Ember 3D printer project; Aghababaie stayed onboard for the 2017 spinout that would become Holo.
Expertise across both technology and strategy is crucial for actually commercializing a successful new enterprise. While most 3D printing operations today focus on selling and installing 3D printers, Holo is taking a more direct-to-customer route.
“We’re focusing on selling parts primarily, rather than selling the equipment,” Zarem said simply. “This lowers the barriers to adoption for this technology. Our customers many times don’t want to buy and operate a printer. Even if they do, they don’t want to take a year to raise capital and implement training. We can go from a file sent to us to a part in a few days to a few weeks. That has been very welcome to our customer base. Combining that with the low-cost nature of our metal printing, we have been able to access a set of applications that would never consider 3D printing.”
That customer base is built up of users drawn to copper’s unique conductive capabilities. Among key applications, Holo highlights the high-performance computer market, electric vehicles, complex electrical interconnects, RF antennas, and heat exchangers.
A 3D printed stainless steel gyroid cross-section designed and manufactured by Holo with features ... [+]
With stainless steel next up for consideration, and some customers already sampling this forthcoming capability, applications across demanding industries like aerospace and medical may also be opening up. Other metals and ceramics are also on the horizon as Holo eyes expansion.
Currently, leading customers are using PureForm parts for high-end cooling needs: think semiconductors, data processing, electronics. These, Zarem added, are “volume applications you don’t typically associate with additive manufacturing.”
Holo’s DLP-based technology relies on two notable aspects that position it uniquely in the metal 3D printing space: slurry material and high-speed, high-resolution production. Combined with meeting a need — high-end parts — and removing the barrier of investing in new capital equipment and the training to go along with it, Holo seems to be hitting a sweet spot when it comes to production-focused AM.
“The applications we’re going after are where our customers are using tens of thousands to sometimes hundreds of thousands of parts per month in a similar approach. This is the kind of volume market that metal additive has never been able to access previously,” Aghababaie said.
The Holo team is currently about 25 employees strong, “mostly in engineering,” the CEO added. He expects that team size to double this year. A Series B financing round is also in the plans for 2021, as Zarem hopes to see Holo joining the ranks of well-financed AM companies.
