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by Gary S. Vasilash > Editor-In-Chief Brennon White is manager of New Technologies, Johnson Controls Automotive Seating ( JCI.com ). White is also a member of the National Additive Manufacturing Innovation Institute ( manufacturing.gov/nnmi_ pilot_institute.html ). Not surprising, given the "New Technologies" of his title and his membership, White is deeply involved in fnding the ways and means that JCI can implement additive manufacturing (AM). One of the things that he thinks is essential for engineers to realize is that compared to the past—which is not all that long ago in actual years, but almost a lifetime ago in AM years, as the technology is undergoing rapid development ("This technology is moving faster than Moore's Law," White says)—the objects that can be produced with the technology are not necessarily fragile, that they can be both resilient and robust. "The old adage used to be that you'd make three of them," White says of printed parts. "One was for your manager to break. One for your customer to break. And one for you to keep, but it would break." The breakage is pretty much a non- issue, unless, of course, one produces something that is fragile by design. White has a bin that was made with selective laser sintering (SLS). It is made with a glass-flled nylon. "I dropped it on a concrete foor from 6 ft. up, and it only has a tiny little dent in it." Clearly, kid gloves no longer need be worn when dealing with AM. Talk to anyone who has involvement in AM and you're likely to hear a remarkable story before too long. White has one: They needed a metal part. The part, in efect, was to be used as a platform upon which other components were going to be assembled. They needed to see how all of the parts would come together. "It was going to take three months and $50,000," White says of the metal part. "We came up with a glass-flled nylon solution that took three weeks and cost $4,500." In addition to the cost and time savings, he points out that it helped the overall development process: "That allowed us to do our development in parallel. Before it would have been done in series, so it saved two to three months." At JCI, he explains, they're using AM techniques for "ft, fnish and functional understanding." White adds: "It helps us solve problems. We can see things that we hadn't been able to see before—like being able to see in things and through things." They are, however, trying to fgure out how to use it to quickly make prototype tools and molds for production parts. ("We do a lot of stamping, welding and injection molding.") White acknowledges that machining technology—subtractive manufacturing— is getting increasingly better. He also says that they've found in some instances machining was more cost-efective than additive due primarily to the material costs associated with additive. He thinks that there are a few things that need to happen for AM to become more pervasive, and reductions in material costs are one of them. He points out that for a given plastic material (e.g., ABS), the cost of a flament role is an order of magnitude or so greater than the cost of the material in injection molding style pellets. (There is something of the chicken-or- egg situation regarding the entrance of big material suppliers into the AM arena, White says. That is, he's talked with some of those suppliers who say that there needs to be a greater number of machines in the market before it becomes more cost-efective for them to make an entry into the market, but one could assume that the comparatively high cost of the material for AM may be keeping the penetration of equipment into the market lower.) Another thing that White believes will help proliferate AM is faster processing speeds, and he says that there seems to be a lot of work going on—by industry, academia, and research organizations— that should make this a reality in the not-too-distant future. AD&P; > June 2014 > FEATURE > On Additive > Gary S. Vasilash > gsv@autofeldguide.com 36 0614ADP FEATURE On Additive.indd 36 5/21/2014 12:52:04 PM