Holo plans to lower the adoption barriers by one 3D metal part at a time

By now we’ve all heard the battle cry for additive manufacturing (AM / 3D printing): Complexity is free; Mass customization is real; Do anything and just click “Print”. Most are simplified methods of realizing the potential for a very real technology suite. While AM ​​is increasingly being used to manufacture end parts – especially after a surge in real world use cases during the global Covid-19 pandemic – adoption on a larger scale still has a long way to go. A young company is launching its PureForm technology as a service to increase production AM for metal parts.

Meet Holo. The Silicon Valley company was spun off from the 3D software giant Autodesk ADSK in 2017. It is now positioning itself as “one of the world’s largest manufacturers of parts for the manufacture of metal additives in 2021”.

A Holo employee unloads parts from an industrial furnace in the Holo production facility … [+] in Silicon Valley, which can produce thousands of additively manufactured parts per month.

Holo

PureForm 3D printing technology

In total, the company holds 16 patents – and another 27 pending patents – covering PureForm printer design, binder materials, and other areas such as thermal designs for AM. The PureForm technology is the main platform for Holos Ambition in the manufacture of metal additives.

PureForm is based on high-resolution TV imagers that structure an entire layer in just three seconds per shift. A proprietary metal-polymer slurry material is formed using the company’s PureForm HD lithographic printers, which are based on 3D printing technology with digital light processing (DLP). Because each build flashes the entire layer, 8 to 24 parts can be made in a single print job without sacrificing speed. More pieces may fit as Holo plans to expand to a larger build platform later this year.

The resulting green parts are debonded and sintered in a MIM (Standard Metal Injection Molding) industrial furnace to create fully dense metal parts. Using a combination of solvent and thermal debonding – the latter is done in the same furnace as the final sintering – speeds up the finishing stages of these parts. After sintering, the parts are approximately 25% smaller than the metal / polymer mixed products that came straight from the printer. Shrinkage is a well known factor in this process. As a result, the software used by the team oversized each part to produce reasonably sized end results based on the precise, predictable composition of the finely tuned raw material.

These final parts have finely detailed features (150-200 microns) that require minimal post-processing – usually just embossing and polishing. The process does not require the use of support structures, the removal of which is typically a time and labor intensive part of completing 3D printing jobs. Furthermore, since the material used is a liquid, no de-powdering is required; Solvent washing is sufficient to remove excess material during the debinding phase. The use of liquid material also eliminates the safety precautions of other metal AM processes such as inert environments, clean rooms and operator PPE.

Copper 3D printing

A 3D printed pure copper liquid cold plate designed and manufactured by Holo. The turbulent design … [+] With 150 µm capabilities, high-performance CPUs and GPUs can be cooled twice as effectively as traditionally manufactured devices, greatly increasing the overclocking of chips.

Holo

At $ 170 billion, copper is the third largest material market in the world, according to Holo. It’s also the first material this company makes available, with end pieces made from 99.99% pure metal.

Targeting this particular material niche is an interesting strategy for a 3D printing company. Laser powder bed (LPBF) 3D printing processes, which comprise a large segment of the availability of metal AM, rely on one or more lasers to fuse metal powders. However, copper is highly reflective and carries heat well, making interacting with lasers to melt copper powder difficult and prone to a not insignificant number of problems.

Interest in 3D printing copper is growing as making geometrically complex parts such as antennas and heat sinks can increase performance in several demanding industries. Other companies, like Australian company SPEE3D, can 3D print copper parts without using lasers, but at a much lower resolution for harsher applications like mining. Recently, more companies have been working on detailed 3D printing capabilities for copper that don’t rely on laser-based processes. For example, Desktop Metal, Markforged, Additive Drives, Digital Metal, and Xact Metal have recently introduced finer functions for this material.

What defines Holo’s approach to copper 3D printing is its focus on production on an accessible scale. This team does not try to make one-off interesting copper parts on occasion. The company’s 20,000 square foot manufacturing facility in the Bay Area can accommodate tens of thousands of customer parts each month.

In holo

To better understand what is happening in Holo, CEO Hal Zarem, PhD, and Chief Strategy Officer, President and Co-Founder Arian Aghababaie, PhD gave more insight into the company’s capabilities and strategies.

The backgrounds of these two executives are decisive for the entire holo strategy. Zarem, with a “background running startups in Silicon Valley in materials, hardware, and devices,” says, “What Holo does is very natural to me.” His leadership will guide the fledgling company’s journey, and that background in scaling Silicon Valley startups will be vital. For Aghababaie, a decade of AM experience included working on DLP / SLA 3D printing technology. “What we’re doing at Holo is an extension of that technology, stretching from polymer to metal,” he noted. Autodesk acquired its former company in 2014 to focus on that work and eventually launched the short-lived but ambitious Ember 3D printer project. Aghababaie stayed on board for the 2017 spinout that was to become Holo.

The technological and strategic know-how is critical to the actual commercialization of a successful new business. While most of the 3D printing operations today focus on selling and installing 3D printers, Holo is taking a more direct route to the customer.

“We mainly focus on selling the parts rather than selling the equipment,” Zarem said simply. “This lowers the barriers to adopting this technology. Our customers often do not want to buy or operate a printer. Even if they do, they don’t want to take a year to raise capital and train. We can switch from a file sent to us to a part in a few days to a few weeks. That was very welcome for our customer base. Combined with the low cost of our metal printing, we were able to access a number of applications that 3D printing would never consider. “

This customer base consists of users who are interested in the unique conductivities of copper. Holo highlights the market for high-performance computers, electric vehicles, complex electrical connections, RF antennas and heat exchangers, among others.

A 3D printed stainless steel gyroid cross-section designed and manufactured by Holo with features … [+] up to 300 µm. Gyroids cannot be made using traditional manufacturing approaches, but they are used in 3D printed heat exchangers or in lightweight aerospace and automotive components due to the high surface area to volume ratio and strength to weight ratio.

Holo

With stainless steel being considered next and with some customers already testing this upcoming capability, it may also open up applications in demanding industries such as aerospace and medicine. Other metals and ceramics are also on the horizon when Holo expands his eyes.

Currently, leading customers are using PureForm parts for high-end cooling needs: think semiconductors, computing, electronics. Zarem added that these are “volume applications that you don’t normally associate with additive manufacturing”.

Holo’s DLP-based technology is based on two remarkable aspects that uniquely position it in the metal 3D printing field: slurry material and fast, high-resolution production. Combined with meeting a need – high-end parts – and removing the barriers to investing in new capital goods and the training that comes with it, Holo seems to be hit a sweet spot when it comes to production-centric AM.

“For the applications we’re looking for, our customers use 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 additives have never been able to access, ”said Aghababaie.

The Holo team currently consists of around 25 employees, “mainly in engineering,” added the CEO. He expects the team size to double this year. A Series B funding round is also slated for 2021 as Zarem hopes to add Holo to the ranks of well-funded AM companies.