3Din30: So You Want to Coat 3D Printed Parts?

3Din30: So You Want to Coat 3D Printed Parts?

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[Music] hello and welcome to the next episode of 3d in 30. uh today we're going to talk about coding 3d printed parts uh definitely an interesting topic i learned a lot about this in case you're new to 3d and 30. 3d and 30 is velo 3ds youtube and linkedin live channel so both channels are active now we host this show about every two weeks with a different topic we look at downstream we look at upstream we look everywhere in the 3d printing industry for metals specifically so if you're interested in learning about this technology this is a great place to start we do put these channel all of these sessions are on youtube and so you can find all of our uh library there so if you're looking at the added manufacturing industry industry you've probably seen parts and you've seen these amazing elaborate complex geometries and a number of times we show them as printed because we want you to understand what you're getting right out of the printer and sometimes they're machined uh and that tends to be about as far as we go but for a number of industries especially like uh dod or you know navy marine um aviation you know showing a as printed or a machine part isn't quite enough you're going to need to coat this so coating technologies can do a number of things for us corrosion resistance adhesion service protection aesthetic properties but with these parts you get these complex internal channels and it's not always easy to code in fact for some parts this was seen as impossible until now so you know we are live today so please feel free to drop in a question we would love to hear from you we want to get comments from our audience uh let us know what you're thinking and um you can talk to our speakers directly with no further ado let me introduce our speakers so today i'm happy to bring on to 3d and 30. uh vet uh ted ventresca let me bring you on here and shay davis uh both from kimian service technology and we also have uh you you might see a familiar face if you've watched 3d and 30 before uh this is kurt wagner from wagner machine company ceo of wagner machine company so how's everyone doing today great all right thanks for having us yeah happy happy wednesday uh you know ted let's start with you since you picked up a cup of coffee um we'll get you speaking first can you tell us a little bit about yourself hi mike good thank you very much for having us here you know i just leading into this i've had such a uh such an interest in uh 3d printing of going back years and i'll share that a little bit later on but um i've been with kemi on surface technology uh as their president and uh ceo for eight years now and uh prior to that i was managing director of an international consulting firm uh worked in sales management with some large corporations and media companies actually uh globally and uh it's uh such an interesting creative field uh the metal finishing industry and uh there are uh amazing advances and two of which you're talking about today so it's great to be here awesome and shay uh i love your background we found some some common ground in there um could you kind of give the audience uh a little bit of appreciation of what your what your background is oh so i have a little bit of automotive time mechanic work then i joined the army and i was a crew chief on blackhawk helicopters sometimes called the glorified inspector because we spent a lot of time doing inspections and whatnot but after the army i got out and i decided to get a degree in chemistry and spent about a year in the natural gas industry helping commission a plant and operate it and then from there i decided to move back west where i'm from and well in the area roughly and i found this job by chance worked in the lab for about a year and a half as a chemist and now i'm in business development and uh and tech sales yeah it's uh our common army background and i i couldn't remember if it was blackhawks or another model but it was the blackhawks you mentioned and i've got a sweet spot in my heart for blackhawks i just remember them uh being on the ground in the morning right before dawn loading up and looking up and just seeing the static electricity forming on the blades i just thought i love that um i'll always have that in my mind when i think of blackhawks somebody was in the sandbox then i take it yeah a little time in the mud all right kurt we know you well but in case somebody is new and the first time hearing from you nope i don't know if i locked up or you guys oh he did i was hearing you okay for a little bit all right i think i'm back um so i'm ceo of wagner machine uh we've been doing precision machining for about 40 years and about a year ago we decided to add metal additive and we've been doing that um yeah for about a year now with a sapphire machine from velo3d um we're printing f357 aluminum awesome and you're known for making impossible parts so yep that's uh we've been doing that before additive and now we're pushing the limits even farther yeah it's uh mr impossible himself on our on our show today um so ted we kind of talked a little bit about what kimion does maybe you can give us a broader perspective sure what we are is a chemical manufacturer and specialty chemical company that creates uh chemistry specifically for the industry such as metal finishing anodizing powder coating in various ways whether it's medical products um or automotive aerospace electronics uh aviation you had mentioned at the beginning mike uh and this is our work with kurt as well as the corrosion protection the corrosion resistance because chemion has some very unique patents and unique chemistries that are military specified they meet certain mill detail mill dtls and between that and between the um additional training and the support that you know experts like shea and we have a whole range of r d phd scientists and uh chemistry team developing uh new technologies so between that the support that's provided to customers and the relationship that we forge that's uh it's one of those key things that's beyond the chemistry nice and shay um as the chemistry expert uh what what are you working on so um i'm actually trying to uh i guess storm the industry aerospace defense ground with this new product to replace hexavalent chromium which has kind of been on the out and out in the us finally it's i've already already been kind of um pushed out in europe for reach compliance um and rojas rohs and so we're kind of basically up until recently it's been a challenge uh to penetrate into the aerospace industry for the lighter aluminum alloys uh to you know push out hex balance chromium with a good replacement so etcp is is this new next generation product uh stanford enhanced trivalent chromium pre-treatment that can really be a drop in replacement uh offering uh exceptional corrosion resistance to paint adhesion needed it could be used as a masking agent and a nodic seal you can put it over different process plating processes like sink nickel cad and electrolus nickel to extend as a top coat to extend their their uh salt spray testing corrosion testing uh so it's it's kind of exciting to not only offer anodized chemistry which is a thicker coating but this is a much thinner conductive protection for light metals and you mentioned this technology might have a common history that people are familiar with something from hollywood potentially so yeah a lot of times when people ask me what do you do well have you ever seen movie erin brockovich um she you know she she fights that that carcinogenic uh gold um hexavalent chromium that uh you know causes cancer so we as a company we really pride ourselves on focusing on the more environmental reach row house compliance stuff and you know one of the industry needs has always been to have something to replace that as well as potentially be able to see it so the ctcp also offers a physical um identifier with the the um a bit of a color to the product because hexavalent chromium the native species uh gave a goldish brownish yellow hue which you know basically the the current trivalents were clear and um and also not quite as robust so you mentioned kind of a coding and you know from an application point of view what is a designer trying to do when they code a part what are they trying to accomplish um it depends so in most cases it's often corrosion for resistance performance so they need to go by this test matrix that goes by um our metrics that uh 168 hour salt spray 336 hour salt spray depending on what the application is that's most common for aluminum you might have 120 hour for say um cadmium or maybe 240 i believe actually uh but regardless it it's it's you know you want to hit that that corrosion system performance in some places they only need paint adhesion like under powder coating and stuff like that and this this kind of gives a dual protection um and then being able to know that your parts were coated is kind of nice so you actually know that they've been processed they're protected and you can kind of speed up production in that sense but it's uh can be used in a lot of ways like getting into areas where you can't get that electrolytic or the coatings in there or if you're trying to anodize something and it doesn't you need to be able to get into small shafts down tubes and whatnot this can still provide that uh protection a level of protection uh whereas if it was bare you'd get nothing since you can't get the anodized you know sometimes in there for those kind of plating processes and you mentioned having having a color to verify you mentioned kind of getting in these internal spaces it sounds like having a conformal uh coding is important but what's the downside if it's not conformal if you have gaps um so then you can have uh excessive corrosion potential especially if it's in those weird channels and areas where things can like moisture can cool or collect at least you have this kind of barrier for this conversion coating that reacts with the aluminum surface and it helps protect it against that you know those interesting areas where you can't easily inspect and you can't easily clean out so it just adds an extra level of protection and extends the life of your uh your parts you know kurt i um you know we kind of hinted at it earlier on you're using this for 3d printed parts so what is it about this that creates the synergy between kimian's technology and 3d printed parts um the biggest thing is what shea was just talking about where um with 3d printed parts we're running into parts that require coating in areas that you can that normal processes can't get to so powder coat obviously you have to um you have to have access to the part to be able to to spray the powder on same with a wet paint process but something that a lot of people might not know is coatings like anodized and a lot of different uh electrolus coatings or electroplating processes have to have have to have access they won't coat internal features so as we've as we've run into parts that have internal features that require some sort of corrosion resistance it's been really tricky to find suitable coatings and we have had we've run into applications where we use specialty ceramics to coat internal features but that's a really expensive process this is a much more affordable process and it's something that we can do in-house so it really doesn't have a huge impact on the part cost um and it meets the requirements in a lot of situations you know this is uh one of these parts that we've been talking about can you give us a little bit of history on this one and then i'll show the internals that we had up before yeah so this is a turbine housing uh it's uh it's uh for a very high performance application where they're trying to squeeze every every last bit of efficiency out of it and originally this was designed as a machine component and in an attempt to get a little more efficiency out of it they added cooling channels that you could see before on the section view there um so there's a large cooling channel that goes around the entire outside of this part and what they end up doing is they they pump fuel through that channel and it cools the housing and preheats the fuel and gives them a several percent efficiency bump so that's the that's the application in this in this case i've had other applications with uh with various uh corrosive environments where internal features were a concern and so when you're coding this uh you're coding the internal or channels as well is this little yeah so this one once the we printed the part and then had it heat created um and after finished machining which we also do in house then we do the etcp coating on this one so and that'll coat the that'll coat every surface of the part not just the visible and external surfaces and you mentioned in-house is this coding something that you have to send out for or are you able to do this in-house as well uh we do this coding in-house which is a big advantage we've been using chemion's tcp hf for a long time probably 10 years or so and when we started running into these internal coding issues we called them and asked you know hey could we use the the tcp coding that we're currently using and because of the material we're printing in f357 they said that the tcp hf wouldn't work well um on this material has there's some there's some limitations um but they said they had just come out with a new a new process that works on a wider variety of aluminums and should work on this so we actually tested this on on a different project than this um coded the parts that saw spray tests and everything else and verified that it worked well for the f357 aluminum and are you able to do this and so we've got we've got a we've got a chem film alignment line in-house that we're using um it's pretty straightforward set up and maintained so and so you're doing the coding and the testing in-house or just the cut camion does the testing for us okay nice so and shay i'll kind of come back to you could you provide a little bit um some depth and what kind of testing are you doing uh what are you checking for so some of the things you have to you know as i mentioned he does this in-house we have um either three chemistry or two chemistry kind of tank setups it's probably one of the easiest um uh processes you can do in house next to maybe passivating it's super simple and flexible and i teach a lot of people how to do it who have no engineering or chemical background but for us what we recommend you know monitoring concentration ph and then to check like basically validate your process it's recommended to do salt spray performance testing so uh per like mil dtl 5541 and 81706 which is the governing spec for the 5541 uh it most shops and facilities uh and suppliers would have to do 168 hours so you salt spray salt fog chambers to do this in accordance with astms and and then we also do coating weight tests to make sure you're getting a good coating sometimes if that if there's ever issues but there's there's several things you can do you know coating weights electrical resistivity if you need conductivity um instead of you know you know we want to make sure it's not heating one of the things with hexagram is it's a thicker coating so it would often have to have a different process uh to make sure that when you needed um an electrically conductive surface that you didn't coat too thick well this same process meets both so but you'll do they still do the electrical conductivity testing the salisbury testing coating weights if needed and then paint adhesion as well when there are plates like surfaces that are accessible that you get painted um so and then we have an external mat cap and certified lab that will uh mirror a lot of our testing make sure that we're operating at a level that we it's not you know just um hold help you know internally but we use external testing as well for validation and you know we mentioned this visual verification we actually have an image here it has a certain color to it how would you describe i i would think purple but i think you had some more colorful language lilac um lilac or you know like the the purple flock that you might see on the side of the mountain out here on the west at least um so the uh that coat that color is actually dependent on the alloy series and your pre-treatment so sometimes it's a little stronger sometimes it's a little bit more like of a like a brownish purplish bluish can have a blue hue you can reduce your immersion time for certain alloy series when you don't really want to see as much color um but with like it shows up very well on the lighter alice with that alloys like 20 24 those that have a lot of copper in them or zinc and uh so it has a variation but violet would be uh from the rainbow here and go that way no i i think we're going to need some purple parts at our trade show from now on they look pretty good that'll give us a different part to talk about um and you know just as a reminder we are live today uh if you have any questions about 3d printing coding 3d printed parts the the technologies uh all around this please feel free to drop us a question we'll get to it live um actually see something coming in now okay so there's a question here uh oh hey roger good to hear from you um how thick is the coding in microns and what is the temperature limit that it i assume withstand in um in use and this is coming from somebody who's making micro turbines okay so um the coating is roughly like around 120 nanometers thick and give or take 10 or so animators very very thin coated much thinner than say you know um you know one metal another coatings um and then the temperature limits they they're they're basically stated in the middle specula hexagonal chromium tolerates less high temperatures uh but you know the mil specs as you go up to 250 if you're powder coating it just fine on a powder coating which is an exposure up to 500 degrees um and it still withstands that for those kind of applications but for general applications you know what we do is you follow the mel dtl81706 and and you know try to keep it around that level but you can also test like we always say test everything so if you have certain parts that need to go through exposure of 200 plus degrees fahrenheit then we do testing you know which you basically test it then you salt spray test that you know on panels of the same alloy series and whatnot so you can push the limits a little bit but you know we tend to fall back to the middle spec because that's where um yeah you have to be able to to reference something right and when you say 500 um is that in fahrenheit sorry yeah so it's in powder coating they go up to about 450 to upwards closer to 500 degrees fahrenheit um for curing it okay awesome so roger hopefully that answered your question um so i do want to kind of switch over ted if you could summarize for us a little bit here um what are the major differentiators for this technology what what should people really take away from this you know shea and kurt have touched on truly some of the unique things but the major differentiators is the performance of etcp because trivalent chrome has been around for decades uh the trivalent chrome that has been uh specified for military use and meets this mill dtl has been around since probably the early 2000s uh kemian and our team here were actually the first individuals to commercialize and scale tri-valent chrome the military-specified trivalent chrome which was originally created by the united states navy for commercialization and we've been able to scale that but the unique thing about trivalent chrome and we've been touching upon this whether it's f357 for additive manufacturing or 2024 aluminum is the performance there there are nuances to real to get it to work consistently well and meet conformance on 2024. the unique thing about etcp is it consistently performs and conforms on 2024 aluminum and in addition to that in addition to that performance and performance on 7000 series and consistent performance on other alloys as well the additional aspect is when this is being used either by the dod or by tier one providers or captive shops there has been a history of use for decades eight decades plus of utilizing hexavalent chrome in which that colorization you know is key because that that person who is the applicator they may be going through that part and they are not from necessarily the chemical or science side they're they they're the applicator whose job is to provide the application to that part and they need to have that color verification so in addition knowing that that card is that that part is coded and protected is an additional value to it but it's the 2024 performance uh it is the and you know and also too i think we go back to it and i think you know kurt is a perfect example of this collaboration of trying to find that solution and tr and being there to support their process and when when metal additives and additive manufacturing of 3d parts metal is now just going from a prototype part to hundreds of thousands of parts that consistent performance and can and conformance has to be in place and uh kurt certainly has perfected that and your your pre 3d printers have certainly perfected that and the great thing is that um chemi on etcp is a coating that complements that and supports that from a corrosion standpoint we have a question uh coming in from sanjay uh what coating should be used on parts for uh withstanding high pressure so uh he mentions at least a four bar what what advice would you give tag that's why we need sean our phd uh senior vp of tech on that one um maybe noted get back to you on that one sanjay it's uh you know the thing is once this this coating is actually dry it's it's very hardcoded it's very difficult to remove the stamp quite a bit um it's you know it's not like an oxide layer from anodizing i use that a lot for reference but when you build that oxide layer it's you know two-thirds above another below the original substrate surface um but this chem film it just it bonds with the substrate and forms a very hard coating in the sense that it's difficult to remove so once it's dry um you know it takes a strong acid to to remove it so that potentially could be an application that it could be used with high pressure but i would need to know a little more detail and i'll probably get back to something like that and you know it's a kind of a segue usually we put this in at the end but what would be the best way to get in touch with uh with either you or the phds you mentioned like if people do have questions they want to dive deeper into their applications how should they do that so i mean on our website just chemion.com uh we do have an email email

i actually get that email so i see every sort of information that comes in but you can also reach me at just my first initial last name at camion.com or dots or anything and uh i'm pretty accessible uh i mean i may be the sales person for all our global customers all over but we're a small company that really kind of has a very good ability to reach us to ask us lots of questions and a good team to i can reach out to you in our tech center perfect so yeah uh mike that the great thing is when when people do interact and kurt is certainly a great uh example of this you can actually get to the individuals who created the chemistry or have commercialized the chemistry and brought it to market so i mean it it's it's a very short step process to get the answers or the support that you need and you know right now we have actually have an oem uh automotive oem and a number of tier one process shops in our training for anodizing and trivalent chrome uh right now in our training center downstairs so that that it's so it's much more than just selling or providing a chemistry it really is the entire package yeah it's not and you know we've heard from some people already um i know some of these industries are represented here but it could you give us a perspective on what types of industries would be common for you to provide solutions for e well you certainly have the dod we have a wonderful relationship a collaborative relationship with the army uh and not to both of you to the navy air force we're in projects with the marines on a very interesting field application of etcp we and that certainly extends to coast guard and national guard as well but uh of the automotive industry aviation uh solar if i'm missing anything space of course you've got a couple customers for space and air space in general and satellite aerospace uh absolutely and the work that shea does with the oems is making them aware of this alternative because again two hexavalent chrome has been used in anodizing as a nautic seal uh it's been used as a as a coating on the on the alloy itself on the skin of aircraft and when you think of getting into the intricate parts that uh kurt assembles and designs and when you're bringing multiple parts together getting into that getting into the coatings of those intricate internal aspects is something that is unique and especially that it performs and uh you can be your the end users have have a clear proven comfort level and validated comfort level that that card that that part is coded all of that combines to you know being a uh a great we try to be a great resource not only just the chemistry we provide but but everything we provide beyond that and uh kurt we'll actually kind of want to hear from you since we're sort of on this topic of working with kimion how is it working with kimion how did you first learn about the company and and what's the relationship been like um i actually don't know how we first started working with kenya i'm not sure how we how he got in touch with them but the reason we got in touch with them and decided to bring this process in-house was because we had electronic components that needed uh chem film coating on them and they also had to get a paint process done to them and our painter had been uh taking care of the chem film process and their vendor had some sort of issues they were having some quality issues and as we looked into that we realized that there was a lot of extra shipping going on um and the quality issues uh we decided to bring that in-house um and it saved us you know say it saves us a lot of money on different parts um but that was kind of why we got into it was one specific project but over the last 10 years or so it's turned into a uh it's turned into a process that we actually you know inform a lot of our customers about it's something that actually provides a benefit for people who didn't even didn't even know it was an option it's something affordable and just gives them a little bit something a little bit of something extra um so that's worked great but as far as working with kamiyang goes um yeah it's been it's been great i one of the things i like to say is you know we're we're excited about machining um and doing things that people think are are impossible or challenging just trying to solve problems and one of the reasons that we chose to work with velo is because you guys are excited about the same thing right doing doing stuff that hasn't been done in in additive yet um and kimion is kind of the same way you know you can you can get a hold of shea she'll call on her cell phone on the way home from work just to talk about this stuff so they're they're excited about what they do too it's extremely nerdy i don't understand most of it but uh but they're very excited about it and it's you know it's great to work with somebody who's excited about what they're doing right so when we have a when we have a question or or uh yeah a new application we can call them up and they they walk us through it and give us uh give us suggestions and so far they've been spot on and i mean you mentioned kind of your customers have you had any feedback from the customers what's your experience in the end use of the code most of the time we don't get any feedback from them which we assume is good right you know you don't don't get any don't hear any that's one of the one of the sad things about it right you know coatings if they work you don't usually hear much about them um so that's kind of like marketing nobody tells you anything yeah so uh we don't get a lot of feedback on that but we have had i mean just in general people who've appreciated being able to provide a little bit of something extra right that they you know sometimes providing something that they needed and they didn't even know they needed right so that's been that's been really nice for us so you know we are at 30 minutes um i i i'll give maybe one enough time for one more question if somebody wants to jump in real quick but before we do that uh let's go around the horn uh and just you know summarize your thoughts uh shay why don't you kick us off i mean so obviously kourtney is uh vladimir she's been a great customer of ours you know we have everywhere from that tier three supplier all the way up to the oems that we work with you know it's been an amazing experience helping these suppliers be able to provide their customers their end users to the defense projects and jobs or aerospace jobs or you know whatever the their end users are um you know we can work with all of them it's been really honestly i love the experience of doing this and you i lockheed might reach out and they'll come here and do some work with us and we'll do some work with them you know or ibd projects for you know uh to to try to discover what we could do to replace hex chrome with um for stuff or airbus or if you have uh conversion coding for for boeing and these you know or space customers or um all these challenges that people need for these hexavalent replacements and um so just being able to see that our our project of our product this atcp this new awesome product can be used in like this new innovation with 3d metal printing i mean up until recently i've just known about the plastic stuff so this metal set was so awesome and it's just it's really exciting to see that there's always something new that we can work on it never really gets an honest or stagnant um you know whether you're small or big it doesn't matter with us because we love it all yeah we say we work on everything from missions to mars to racing cars so a little bit of everything in there we even have them yeah we even have those race car engine people using our retcp now it's pretty cool in north carolina very nice uh ted closing thoughts for me yeah you know i'll let go uh a good part of what uh shea said now i'll share with you that you know going back before even joining uh kemi on uh i was in washington dc and involved with um the military in that respect from a business standpoint and i was at the uh unmanned vehicles shows but this is going back 11 years and there was an excitement in the military about talking about putting 3d printers actually in the field and on ships as they needed parts one-off parts so when you think about what has happened in 11 years and 12 years that rather than just a one-off prototype part that was not a mission critical part that was just something that they needed to fix and it was a plastic part that they worked on then to what velo has been able to create and what what kurt has been able to perfect uh in creating and replicating hundreds of parts and and parts that are critical in in tolerance in design and assembling these parts and now being able to provide the the coding aspect that provides that additional corrosion protection for this mission critical when you think about the way all of our industry has moved in just a decade that's what really is you know thank you for curt for saying that and including us with you and fellas that's what we're really excited about and that's what really gives us some great possibilities nice kurt um i'll let you close this out all right well i guess i'm gonna i'm gonna tack on to that um i think what i would say is the most interesting part of our job is is solving challenges for customers and the the vast majority of the time that's not just a machining challenge or part design challenge or something like that the vast majority of the time solving the solving the tough problems involves connecting people right so it's great to be able to work with our different vendors like kemian or velo uh different machine tool manufacturers everybody that we work with and connect the dots so that our customers can end up with the ideal part not just something that's good enough but the ideal part for whatever their application is awesome all right kurt ted thank you great panel today uh and thank you audience for joining us um that is going to be a wrap and uh stay tuned i think our next session is in one week um make sure you follow us on linkedin to get the latest information we're going to tell you the show uh you can find out on linkedin more about it thank you thanks

2022-03-16 00:26

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