Escowitz points out that, with high-volume applications of aligned, high-performance composites, “It’s not the material cost; it’s the process costs” that have kept such composite materials out of consideration. Capital cost per unit is anticipated to be extremely low for aligned composite structures made with Additive Molding — low enough to make the parts cost competitive with parts they would replace, and offer much higher performance than those parts.

My point is that China does not, in any way, need to reverse engineer fantastic American products.  They are capable of innovating and dominating the 3D printing industry based on their years of experience as the world’s producer of pretty much everything via traditional manufacturing, which is not a hindrance to creating great 3D printers and materials.  Their main obstacle is, in my opinion, creating great customer support and really great software for 3D printers.  These advantages lay with the US, Europe, and Australia.

Robotic placement. In the Additive Molding process, prepregged tows and tapes are shaped, cut and placed in a mold cavity by proprietary robotic equipment. Source, all images | Arris Composites

Robotic placement. In the Additive Molding process, prepregged tows and tapes are shaped, cut and placed in a mold cavity by proprietary robotic equipment. Source, all images | Arris Composites

“Mass production” is a term not generally associated with complex composite components that feature continuous, aligned fiber reinforcement, yet composites technologists have long pursued this elusive combination. After all, the market potential is exceptionally large, especially in the automotive industry, for cost-efficient, high-volume, high-performance composite components.

With the exception of components pultruded into very simple profiles, this market potential has not been realized with today’s manufacturing technologies. Composites manufacturers either mass-produce complex composite components made with chopped fiber, or they use relatively low-volume fabrication tech­nologies to make such components with continuous, oriented fiber reinforcement. Though maturing technologies like auto­mated fiber placement (AFP) and continuous-fiber 3D printing are accelerating cycle times, they have not reached mass-production levels for complex high-performance composite components.

The Up! 3D printer technology was licensed to the US company Microboards Inc., from Tiertime, China’s largest 3D printer manufacturer.  They turned it into the Afinia 3D printers, which proceeded to compete well against Makerbot, who have been losing more of their dominant market share since 2009 and a falling short on sales predictions.

Escowitz and Reese hesitate to say just how much faster Additive Molding is compared to traditional fabrication techniques, but they expect the technology to deliver composite components at a cost that is an order of magnitude less than would be incurred with an existing manufacturing method. Reese notes that molding time is the rate-limiting step in their process — not layup. “We configure the additive portion to deliver the layup at the optimal moment for the mold cycle time,” he adds.

Reese continues, “By forming the shapes in our additive step, we are running the fiber paths around features, instead of cutting it out to fit around those features.” Importantly, by eliminating this cutting step, Additive Molding generates less scrap than these other processes, contributing significantly to economies of scale in high-volume production applications.

Makerbot has created some features that exceed those available in Chinese 3D printers. But the former CEO of Tiertime, GuoGe said that their goal was to become the largest 3D printer manufacturer in the world, and wanted to send 80% of their products to developed economies such as the United States and Europe.

Besides dealing with the US government to the tune of 20% of US National Debt held by foreign countries, their partnerships in the technology sector trickle down to the growing 3D printing industry.  3D printers are cheaper to manufacture in China, which isn’t really surprising, but is surprisingly not focused on too often.

Believing that a hybrid technology could be developed for high-speed molding of aligned, continuous fiber-reinforced components, Escowitz set to work. He followed the classic inventor narrative — “tinkering with new technology in his Berkeley, California, garage,” as Forbes described it. He anticipated that the technology could open the floodgates in the automotive and consumer goods markets to wide adoption of complex, high-performance composites. Sure enough, before he had even incorporated Arris Composites, Escowitz received a purchase request from an undisclosed consumer products manufacturer. His work also caught the attention of former Autodesk CEO Carl Bass, who provided seed money, consulting and space in his personal manufacturing shop in Berkeley.

Oriented fiber in complex shapes. Additive Molding is reportedly able to mass produce complex components in which the entire fiber volume is aligned along loading paths.

One key to Additive Molding is that it is vertically integrated from the point at which raw materials enter through the point at which the filled mold is ready for processing and on to demolding of the finished customer-ready parts. The process starts with dry carbon fiber tow, which is prepregged into both tape and tow form through an impregnation process. The prepreg tape may be flat, or it may be formed directly into the needed profile shape. Reese reports that Arris has in-house capability for prepreg tape production, and that a future development will make it possible to feed the tape (and tow) directly into the next manufacturing step. Currently, the company is using commercially available prepreg tape in widths of one to 24 inches, and feeding it to the next step from a spool.

Andrew Wheeler is a 3D printing and technology journalist. He studied Creative Writing at NYU and received his Bachelor's Degree in Information Technology. He is currently working on a multi-media science fiction project. His favorite journalist of all time is George Orwell.

Escowitz describes the challenge that Additive Molding addresses as “scaling novel parts without the cost of traditional aligned fiber composites.” The technology, he asserts, creates structures in which “the entire volume of fiber is running along the mechanical loading pathways you desire and reinforcing where the properties are needed. We can align fibers in a way that no one else can at high production volumes.” This includes some of the rapid preforming methods recently developed, which he says require more capital equipment and cutting and consolidating time than Additive Molding does, and do not provide the level of fiber alignment that the Arris process does.

According to Susie Su, a prototyping consultant for HLH, “In their state-of-the art facility, HLH Prototypes is one of the leading 3D printing manufacturers in China. HLH Prototypes offers custom injection molding in China from their UKAS ISO certified facilities.” Like many other industrial designers, they have a team of design engineers who produce drawings for a wide range of programs for a variety of applications.  Also, like many industrial design services, clients are given 3D prototypes and models for them to test and evaluate,until a final prototype is designed and produced.

Proprietary robotic equipment then shapes, cuts and places prepreg pieces into their final locations within the mold cavity. Once the prescribed prepreg is in place, the mold closes and applies heat and pressure to the composite materials for consolidation and cure. “The mechanism for placing material is different than the mechanism used in automated tape layup and 3D printing processes,” Reese notes. “We are shaping the prepregs as opposed to consolidating and bonding them in-situ. As a result, our preforming process can run at incredible speeds.”

They will be attending many events in 2015 to feature the advancement in their services. In March 2015 they will attend the TCT Show + Personalized.

Fabricating complex shapes. Arris Composites’ trademarked Additive Molding process has the capacity to fabricate small complex components.

Arris expects to begin high-volume production runs in 2020 on some of the parts for which it has been producing test articles this year. Asked about potential sales of Additive Molding systems to other composites manufacturers, Reese reports that the company will manufacture parts itself and plans to keep the technology in-house for the next couple years. Escowitz characterizes the timing of Arris’ technology launch as “serendipitous. The last decade of 3D printing has seeded the design and engineering community with concepts for lightweight structures that require optimally aligned fibers. And if a company needs to produce a high volume of those lightweight structures — that’s where we come in.”

The vision for Additive Molding grew out of manufacturing innovation efforts in which two of Arris’ co-founders, Escowitz and Riley Reese, who is also chief technical officer, were involved. Escowitz and Reese worked on commercializing new 3D printing applications across multiple employers. “The impact of 3D printing on high-volume manufacturing has a history of overestimates,” Escowitz argues, “and this is due to high process and finishing costs per unit produced, plus high material costs.” (Though some 3D printers are finding ways to use commodity materials, many employ high-cost specialized materials.) The pair wanted to find a way to corral the performance benefits of 3D-printed continuous fiber-reinforced composites with the speed and cost benefits of molding technologies. Escowitz describes the idea as “aligned fiber-reinforced molding.”

At the same time, Makerbot wants to score some of the market share in China’s economy to make up for their less than spot-on predictions about their sales numbers.  What do they do? This past November, they partner up with Alipay and, now, Chinese customers have access to Makerbot products to love, use, cherish forever and reverse engineer without consequence.  But does China even need to do this?

An Arris demonstration truss highlights the added value of fully aligned reinforcement (see image). “If you look at the cross-section of our truss compared to a similar pultruded shape of the same cross-sectional area, the entire volume of material in our truss is optimally aligned to support the beam’s load, helping it substantially outperform the pultruded shape,” Escowitz notes. “It is the same amount of material in both, but complexity unlocks performance in ours.”

Bringing on Reese as well as mechanical engineer and startup veteran Erick Davidson (now Arris chief engineer and co-founder), Escowitz continued to advance the technology and capture the attention of a growing number of composites manufacturers and customers. In the process of securing the $10 million investment, the company and its technology were vetted by former GE CEO Jeff Immelt, who was duly impressed. “What we did in automotive to replace non-structural metal with low-cost, lightweight injection molded components in the 1980s, Arris has now enabled for the rest of the vehicle,” he believes.

One of the major advantages of 3D printing — the ability to place fiber at any orientation in three-dimensional space — is also true of Additive Molding. “We are bringing together the benefits of three disparate technologies for the first time,” Reese explains, “the design latitude of 3D printing, the performance of aerospace composites, and the cost and speed of molding.”

Besides owning 20% of US debt held by foreign nations, they produce a massive amount of goods using traditional manufacturing methods.  China is sometimes mistaken as being off the ball or behind the mark when it comes to 3D printing.  They are not.  China’s 3D printing is estimated to grow to $1.6 billion (USD) by 2016, up from $163 in 2012.  The Chinese government has invested around $33 million,which funded an established network of 10 3D printing innovation centers.  They aren’t new to the industry and have been involved in R & D since 1992.  Many of China’s universities and vocational schools such as Tsinghua University and South China University of Technology offer courses in additive manufacturing.

Take HLH Prototypes, for example, which is one of China’s top 3D printing manufacturing and rapid custom injection molding companies in China. By adding 3D printing to traditional manufacturing techniques, such as injection molding, they are able to quickly make a prototype and then produce significant volumes via rapid injection molding to produce plastic and metal components.

“Their engineers are able to work on plastic injection molds to fit any program requirement regardless of product size and complexity. HLH Prototypes is able to shave weeks off lead times to ensure clients get high quality products on time and every time.”

A recent effort to combine high performance and high volume, however, shows great promise to successfully bridge the gap. Newcomer Arris Composites (Berkeley, Calif., U.S.) caught the industrial world’s attention in May of this year when a Forbes article featured founder and CEO Ethan Escowitz. The article also covered the company’s announcement that it had closed $10 million in Series A funding — a strong endorsement of Arris’ trademarked and patent-pending Additive Molding process. Before this newsworthy event, Escowitz himself characterized the previous two years as “stealth work,” so it is only in the past few months that many composites stakeholders have started investigating and assessing the potential of Additive Molding.

Fabricating complex shapes. Arris Composites’ trademarked Additive Molding process has the capacity to fabricate small complex components.

Sometimes, details of Chinese and American partnerships in the 3D printing industry are hard to come by, but it will be interesting to see how 3D printing companies around the world create new partnerships in 2015.

Oriented fiber in complex shapes. Additive Molding is reportedly able to mass produce complex components in which the entire fiber volume is aligned along loading paths.