How additive manufacturing technology is changing the game for manufacturers

Eric Johnson 

Eric Johnson is a seasoned leader in additive manufacturing, currently spearheading the innovative efforts of the additive manufacturing team at Eaton's research labs. His journey into additive manufacturing began 12 years ago, fueled by a passion for pioneering new materials, processes, and applications in the field. 

Eric joined Eaton after 20 years at Deere & Company based in Moline, IL, where he held diverse materials engineering and advanced manufacturing roles. He was named a John Deere fellow in 2020. Eric holds a Ph.D. in Material Science and Engineering from Iowa State University. 

Cameron Peahl 

Cameron Peahl leads additive manufacturing at Eaton’s Additive Manufacturing Center of Excellence in Southfield, MI. He has more than 15 years of extensive manufacturing experience and 6 years of dedicated focus in deploying additive technologies globally across multiple industry sectors. He has a proven track record of leveraging additive manufacturing to unlock new applications for prototyping, tooling, supply chain resiliency, and superior products.  

Cameron holds a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Roger Williams University and an MBA from University of Massachusetts – Dartmouth.

NARRATOR: Welcome to Eaton's 10 in 10 Podcast, where we focus on industry trends shaping the future of power management. In this series, our expert answers 10 questions about one of today's most talked about industry topics in 10 minutes or less, from the energy transition to digital transformation and beyond. We explore trends and discuss strategies for delivering safer, more efficient, and reliable power.

Industry 4.0 technologies, such as additive manufacturing, opened new opportunities for manufacturers like Eaton. This revolutionary technology allows us to design geometries that can't be made with traditional processes.

I'm Eric Johnson, Senior Manager of Additive Manufacturing at Eaton Research Labs. And joining me today is Cameron Peahl, manager of Eaton's Additive Manufacturing Center of Excellence. We'll talk about how this technology is changing the way Eaton designs and manufactures products for our customers and how it supports our manufacturing operations.

Cam, we have 10 questions in 10 minutes, so let's get started. Cam, could you explain what additive manufacturing is and how it differs from 3D printing?

CAMERON PEAHL: So most of us are familiar with the term 3D printing, and think of it as the extrusion style desktop machine that many of us now have at home. The terms are somewhat synonymous. But additive manufacturing is a broader category that encompasses many different types of technologies and materials, all with the goal of producing parts at a scale and quality that is comparable to conventional manufacturing.

All additive manufacturing or 3D printing technologies work the same way, by taking a three-dimensional part file, slicing it into thousands of layers, and then physically constructing the part layer by layer by consolidating the feedstock material in some fashion.

And there are many different techniques for additive manufacturing, from melting plastic and extruding it into a specific shape, all the way to spraying hypersonic powder metal onto a substrate and having the powder particles fuse together.

ERIC JOHNSON: Can you talk about how additive manufacturing has evolved within Eaton?

CAMERON PEAHL: Eaton established the Additive Manufacturing Center of Excellence in Southfield, Michigan, in 2016. Initially, we started here with just a couple of machines to explore the technology's potential, but we very quickly realized its entire value.

So fast forward today, and we have a significant additive footprint globally across all of our businesses. We have regional COEs with focus on certain businesses, AM machines in just about every factory, and even an Additive Manufacturing Center of Excellence that is dedicated to full-rate production for our Aerospace Group.

ERIC JOHNSON: How is Eton utilizing additive manufacturing today?

CAMERON PEAHL: So today, additive manufacturing is really integrated globally into our businesses. We focus on developing solutions in four key value pillars-- prototyping, tooling, supply chain resiliency, and superior product design. Our engineering centers use AM for rapid prototyping and compressing our engineering cycle times. Factories are using AM to produce spares and repairs for legacy equipment, as well as tooling like jigs, fixtures and molds.

Our supply chain teams use AM to keep our assembly lines from running out of components. And our new product teams are using AM to develop the next generation of solutions. In addition to all of that, we also continue to expand the use and push the envelope of AM through research and materials, machines and designs at our Southfield Center of Excellence.

ERIC JOHNSON: These four pillars have helped our teams focus on additive manufacturing's key differentiators from the traditional manufacturing processes. But before we dive into the value to Eaton, could you talk about the advantages additive manufacturing offers to Eaton's customers?

CAMERON PEAHL: Additive manufacturing is enabling us to speed up prototyping, meet delivery needs, and continuously innovate to solve our customers' biggest challenges. One of the initial lead programs came from our aerospace team. And the challenge was to redesign the jet pump for an Airbus platform.

This project not only resulted in the industry's first additively manufactured fuel pump for a commercial platform, but also succeeded in lowering the part's weight by 29% and consolidating 11 parts down to 1 to improve reliability and performance. Speed, reliability, performance, and delivery are all significant advantages for our customers.

ERIC JOHNSON: Let's return to the value pillars you talked about earlier. Prototyping is the core of additive manufacturing technology. Can you talk a little bit more about how that's changed and give an example of how we're using it?

CAMERON PEAHL: Yeah. So additive manufacturing has, at least in the past, had a reputation for making parts that were not very durable or functional but were great to look at. That has really all changed, especially recently.

We have materials available to us today that allow us to build prototypes for real functional testing, not just for fit-ups. As an example of where Eaton is winning for its customers with AM is a program where Eaton's mobility group was working with a major automotive customer that needed over 40 functional prototypes on a time scale that was just impossible to deliver with traditional molding processes.

The AM team worked with the mobility group engineers to redesign the part to take advantage of the previously unavailable additive materials and machine capabilities. And this allowed us to deliver real functional prototypes on time. And ultimately, Eaton won the full production contract with this key customer.

ERIC JOHNSON: Earlier mentioned the additive is helping our manufacturing operations as well. How are we leveraging this technology in that space?

CAMERON PEAHL: Things like-- or tools like jigs, fixtures, and even molds are a great fit for additive manufacturing because they tend to be complex. And we usually don't make a whole lot of them, or at least of a single design. We are using fused filament fabrication across almost all of our factories for things like assembly jigs, paint masking, custom tools, and even 5S Plus accessories to keep our work areas organized and safe.

This is Eaton's 113th year of manufacturing products. Like most manufacturers, we do have some legacy equipment in our operations that are absolutely vital to our factories. So to keep this essential pieces of equipment running, we often need to produce our own spares and repairs.

For example, a plating line in our Syracuse, New York, facility had a gear that was stripped and needed to be replaced. The part was no longer commercially available, so we quickly made a replacement using additive manufacturing to get the line back up and running. Our teams keep finding new ways to use our additive manufacturing capabilities to make their workspaces and processes more efficient and improve the safety of their work environments.

ERIC JOHNSON: You mentioned that supply chain resiliency is also one of the pillars. Can you explain what you mean by supply chain resiliency and how AM is helping in this area?

CAMERON PEAHL: Our products are made of many different components from many different suppliers. Supply chain resiliency is all about having a reliable and robust supply chain, which includes diversifying where and how you get the components you need to manufacture products.

Remember during the pandemic, when the supply chain shortage and microchips hit the vehicle market, making purchasing new vehicles and appliances nearly impossible? This is exactly what we are trying to avoid. There is nothing more frustrating for our customers than not being able to get the parts they need when they need them.

One of the most common issues we have in our supply chain is that many parts we make require specialized tooling. Castings require patterns, plastic parts require molds, and so on. So these tools are expensive. So we typically try to make only one set, and they generally take a long time to make. When we run into problems with these tools and a supplier can't make the parts, it can be really difficult to find alternatives without reinvesting in the tooling.

Additive manufacturing is a toolless manufacturing technology. We can use it to produce the parts we need on demand, especially when only a handful of parts are needed to keep the production lines running, or to fulfill a spare part order for a legacy product.

ERIC JOHNSON: The last pillar that you mentioned was superior product. Where is Eaton making a difference with additive and providing superior products?

CAMERON PEAHL: So additive manufacturing is really a natural fit in aerospace, where customer value comes directly from lighter weight, higher performing parts. Eaton's aerospace additive manufacturing team is using additive designs extensively to improve the fluid power and manifolds.

Traditionally, manifolds are a casting or machined out of large billets of material. These processes limit the designs of fluid paths and require whole shapes and paths that can be machined. This limits the way fluid paths are made and introduces many additional holes that later need plugs.

Additive eliminates this limitation. We can design computationally optimized fluid paths to reduce power losses since we are not limited by geometry anymore. This allows our engineers to design products based on performance, weight, and quality, rather than by the constraints of traditional manufacturing processes. And we can produce them at a lower cost. These are big wins for our customers. I'll give you an example.

We recently developed a new, highly complex hydraulic control system that required 18 manifolds. Producing this product with additive manufacturing saved over 1,000 pounds of weight, which is a reduction of 65%, plus a reduction in size envelope of 46%. It also eliminated 680 connection points that would have been locations for possible leaks.

So Eric, what recommendations would you give to those considering adding additive manufacturing to their capabilities?

ERIC JOHNSON: When I started working in additive manufacturing in 2013, we felt like it was a very cool tool. We went out seeking generic problems to solve. One example is initially we set goals that weren't very realistic, like thinking that we could eliminate warehouses by using additive manufacturing at scale. We quickly learned that it's critical to clearly understand the problem that you're trying to solve with additive manufacturing.

Start with a business case. Identify a problem, such as the difficulty or cost in procuring low-volume parts. Or look at design geometries that are very difficult to manufacture with your typical production methods. Or look for high cost of tooling that's needed to produce for your products. These kind of problems are the things that can be solved with additive manufacturing.

CAMERON PEAHL: I think that really helps frame where we should start. We have time for one last question. Where do you see additive manufacturing heading in the future?

ERIC JOHNSON: So the vision of additive manufacturing has been much like theStar Trek replicator. You say what you want, and it appears. Of course, we're not quite to that point yet. But in some sense, this is the direction AM is going.

With the use of computational design tools, advances in material science, and even maturing additive manufacturing processes, we're moving towards the ability to automate the design and manufacturing process. Eaton designs parts for nearly an infinite number of conditions.

We must consider structural loads, material compatibilities, electrical requirements, temperatures, and environments in which these parts are being used. All of these conditions, they interact with each other. This makes for a very complex design space for a single engineer to have an optimized design.

Today, we can leverage the computational power to solve these multi-objective design problems that could never have been solved in the past. Because of the design freedom that comes from additive manufacturing, we can actually make these complex designs a reality to solve the most challenging customer problems.

Another area that I can see us making progress on is reducing the manufacturing cost of these processes. If we succeed in our research work, we expect to have a cost reduction of 10 times what we have today. This type of cost reduction will really unlock more and more places that we can use this technology and accelerate its adoption.

CAMERON PEAHL: Thanks, Eric. It is really a very exciting time to be in additive manufacturing. Thank you all for listening today. To learn more about how we are using additive manufacturing, visit us at eaton.com/additivemanufacturing.