Formnext is the world's largest additive manufacturing trade show, bringing together innovations, ideas and the next generation of manufacturing technology. The 3D People team attended the show to join in on the action and catch up with suppliers, customers and industry friends. Here’s our take on what went down at Formnext 2022.

Companies from around the world get together in Frankfurt to showcase their latest inventions and launch their next generation of technology, with the big brands of the manufacturing industry dominating the floor space. Chirpy salespeople patrol their exhibition stands armed with complimentary coffee and 3D-printed pens. Brave new competition and smaller companies pop up yearly, eager to establish their place alongside the big players.

Compared to previous shows, Formnext 2022 celebrated the impressive parts the technologies can make, with the additive manufacturing machinery taking a step back from the spotlight. This year, all eyes were on the advancement of material finishes.

Another prominent takeaway from the 2022 show was automation. A few exhibitors have leapt to the factories of the future, displaying their end-to-end additive manufacturing solutions. They replace labour-intensive steps in the AM process with automated robotic arms, conveyor belts and AI vision to shift additive factories into 24-7 production lines.

Read more about the 3 key elements that caught our attention at this year's event: 

1. Automation

Digital manufacturing is the cornerstone of industry 4.0. Controlling physical production with digital technology enables the intelligent and connected product/production ecosystem. We can all envision what smart factories might look like, manufacturing machinery operated by AI connected with unprecedented levels of data. However, achieving this vision requires automating the entire additive manufacturing process.

Unfortunately, 3d printing is just one stage of the manufacturing production process flanked by other steps, frequently requiring human input. Validating a new design for manufacture, preparing the 3d data, quality checks, applying surface finishes and packaging are just some of the other stages that make up the complete production process. Comprehensive automation is only achievable when all these processes are connected and executed without human intervention.

This year at Formnext, we saw some exciting innovations in this space. Notably, AM-Flow displayed its modular system for automating the processes after the 3d printers have done their job. To provide some context for the problems they are solving, take the MJF process as an example. In our factory, each production run of the MJF machine can contain thousands of unique parts destined for delivery to different customers. After 3d printing, a human identifies each individual part to check which process the part should follow next. Some require a finishing process, such as black dye, after which the group of freshly dyed parts needs sorting again. During the production process, a single part may go through this sorting process four times before it's packaged and sent to the customer.

AM-Flow developed a fantastic technology to remove the requirement to sort multiple times manually and have increased traceability and quality control of parts through AM factories. AM-flow's new modular system uses photogrammetry to identify parts fed under the vision module on a conveyor belt. The photographs match the parts to the 3d file and direct the object to the correct next post-process. Automating sorting is an excellent innovation for AM factories dealing with high volumes of unique parts. AM-flow claims that just one operator can process six times the normal manual volume.

In addition to its sorting module, AM-flow has developed a quality control module. Most additive factories manually measure a small percentage of parts from a batch to check the dimensional accuracy. The remaining parts undergo a brief visual inspection to detect warping and other part defects. AM-flow's automated quality inspection module can identify these issues for every part; a massive improvement to the quality control process.

AM-flow were not alone in its automation efforts. AMT uses robotic arms to connect the different finishing machines into a single production line. The image below shows a continuous feed of parts into AMT’s automated bead blaster; the parts are then picked and placed onto trays. A second robot moves the trays into AMT’s chemical smoothing machine.

2. Finishing

The common conception is that the surface finishes of 3d printed parts are poor quality compared to most traditional polymer manufacturing methods. It is no surprise that the industry has focused on improving surface finishes. The effort has been led by a few dedicated companies on a mission to "turn raw 3d printed parts into high-value products" as the Dyemension team calls it. There is fierce competition between the powder-bed-fusion machine manufacturers; companies such as EOS, 3D Systems, HP and Formlabs fight over the best surface finish, detail resolution, accuracy and part properties. The companies dedicated to finishing technologies have become the glue that binds them back together. After processing the parts with the same surface finishing treatment, the final results are much the same. Therefore, companies such as AMT & Dyemansion have swooped in with offerings that are accessible no matter what machine you are running.

Although not a new technology, chemical smoothing is swiftly becoming an industry standard for finishing polymer AM parts. The surfacing technique provides an excellent baseline for more specialist finishes, enabling more industries to utilise additive manufacture.

For those unfamiliar, chemical smoothing is a surface finishing process that uniformly smooths the surface of a plastic part, creating a finish that rivals injection moulding and increases part properties such as sealing and increased mechanical strength. A chemically fused surface improves the effectiveness of additional post-processes—for example, more vivid colours through dying and metallic surfaces through vacuum metallising.

3. Climate Change

A disappointing note of Formnext was the lack of emphasis on emissions, waste, recycling or anything sustainable. Especially considering the exhibition overlapped with COP27, only a few companies in the additive space mentioned sustainability, and even Formnext hosted very few talks on the subject. Our concern is that without serious innovation in sustainable materials and processes, additive manufacturing will fall short of the standards required by the rest of the world.

The most notable of the few sustainable efforts on display was Evonik's adoption of carbon-neutral and bio-based polyamide materials. Evonik is the largest manufacturer of polymer powders, supplying industry leaders such as 3D Systems, EOS & HP. 

Recently Evonik, through renewable energy adoption, has improved the carbon emissions of their PA12 material dubbed "Vestamid". Evonik's material development is fantastic; however, adopting the new material is challenging for companies using industrial additive technology as most machine manufacturers restrict the use of materials outside of their own offerings. We expect it will be a few years before this material is approved and readily available.