Thanks for coming.

My name's Chris [? Wallen. ?] I'm an engineer here at Google

on the Maps team.

And I'm hosting today Walter Voit and Srishti Goel

from Adaptive 3D Technologies, and they're

going to give a talk about what they

call their extreme 3D printing.

So without further ado, I present Walter Voit.

WALTER VOIT: Thanks, Chris.

It's a pleasure to be back here at Google.

As Chris mentioned, I'm Walter Voit.

We founded Adaptive 3D about two years ago

as a spin-out from a company that I founded back

in grad school called Syzygy Memory Plastics.

In my spare time, I'm a professor at UT Dallas

and run a research lab that focuses in polymer chemistry,

in flexible electronics, in radiation processing

and materials, and looking at fundamental interfaces

of materials.

And in this quest to make better, stretchier,

lighter, stronger materials, we've

come up with some really neat ways

to be able to build them layer by layer

and make stronger, tougher, 3D printed parts.

Let's get right into it.

So Adaptive started in 2014.

Up here is our management team.

I'm the president for now until we

find sort of a seasoned management

team, for which we're looking.

Srishti, who's here, just joined the team a little while ago.

She got her Material Science degree at Columbia,

and is leading a lot of interactions with the companies

that we work with.

Dr. Lund is an organic chemist by training

who specializes in a lot of our new synthetic monomers.

Dan Patterson is our first investor.

He's a seasoned private equity guy back in Dallas.

He's bought and sold more than 30 companies since 1993

and does a lot in the middle market manufacturing

and business logistics, and I think

has really come in and given us a lot of experience.

He was a Harvard MBA guy from the late '70s.

And finally, Brent Duncan.

He was the co-founder with me of Syzygy Memory Plastics.

He and I were grad school buddies from Georgia Tech.

He was in the MBA program and I was in the PhD Program.

Brent also has a PhD in Material Science and Engineering

from Duke University, and spent some time with a nicotine

s startup company in the Research Triangle.

And then has been working with a lot of technology

transfer back in Dallas for the better part of the last half

decade.

So what our mission and what our job at Adaptive is,

is to really provide services to large companies.

We work primarily with large Fortune 500 companies.

Halliburton is our first big, big customer.

We've also engage a number of others.

And we're trying to build parts that can't be made today

by conventional means.

So let me get into what that market opportunity is.

In the past almost 25 years, 3D printing-- you guys

have probably heard it as a buzz word, as a tech word--

and it means a lot of different things

to a lot of different people.

You can 3D print metals, ceramics, plastics,

so we're a niche.

We're just focused on plastics, and within the area

of plastics, we've focused on soft, rubber-like materials,

and viscoelastic materials, materials

that have extreme toughness.

3D printing has had a 25% compounding annual growth rate

over the last 25 years or so, and it's

projected to serve as a critical part of the $16 trillion

manufacturing economy by 2030.

And you have to ask why that is.

Well, a lot of the big companies in our space,

in the polymer space, 3D Systems and Stratasys

are two of the large players.

And I think a lot of market hype sort of caught

up and even surpassed the expec--

or surpassed the reality of where 3D printing was.

If you look at a lot of these stock prices,

in 2014 there were some pretty big peaks,

and things haven't been so rosy on the market

side for 3D printers.

And the reason is because companies

have been unable to 3D print high value industrial parts.

A lot of 3D printers and 3D printing companies,

we like to call the Kickstarter babies,

have come out with the shock and awe.

The hey, let's print something really quickly, or let's print

some really complex widgets.

But a lot of the back end market reporting

from Wohlers and from other sources

has identified this giant additive manufacturing market

as the real value add.

It's the idea that you can print materials.

That if you print this first layer, the second layer,

the third layer, the fourth layer,

they need to be as strong in this x-direction

or this y-direction as they are in this z-direction.

And a lot of parts suffer from this problem called anisotropy,

not the same in all directions.

And so with our background in understanding polymers

and polymer physics, we've focused

on printing isotropically tough parts,

and have found really neat ways to chemically

cross-link plastics in this direction,

as well as in this direction to make them strong and tough.

And in a little bit I'll show some

of the materials properties, some of the stress strain

curves.

I don't get too nerdy and techie,

but that's sort of the limiting problem that's

kept these kinds of materials from being

a solution to industrial problems.

Today, a lot of 3D printed parts are used to print molds,

to print jigs, and then you'll do conventional manufacturing

in those 3D printed molds.

But it's difficult to print a rubber, to print a plastic,

and have that go into an automobile,

have that go into an oil well, have

that go into a tennis shoe, have that go into a spaceship.

And so, what we're looking at doing

is solving that problem for a subset of materials.

So today less than 29% of 3D printed parts

are used for functional parts, and the market

is just a fraction of what it could become.

So what have we done over at Adaptive

to print these tough, high quality rubbers and plastics?

Well, we've focused on very scalable solutions.

So while we are synthetic, organic chemists at root,

we've tried to limit the design and manufacture of brand

new monomers.

But we use things that we can source from large chemical

manufacturers that can be scaled to meet a large market.

We've developed a very nice patent portfolio.

A lot of the research has been translated from research

at the University of Texas at Dallas.

But we've been able to build materials

with incredible strain capacity, things

that can stretch five times their original size

and then snap back into shape.

Or things today that have a toughness of 16 megajoules

per meter cubed, and some experimental materials that

are far greater than that.

And I'll get more into those details in a little bit.

We also tune a lot of the important properties

for 3D printed parts.

We've developed a new kind of 3D printer to make our polymers,

following a process called SLA or stereo lithography.

But we've used Texas Instruments DLP projectors.

You might have seen the ads, it's

the little mirrors, little girls with elephants running around.

Maybe you've got home theater projectors.

I don't know if this is a DLP projector, but it probably is.

But what we can do is we can focus light.

These mirrors will actuate at about 6,000 Hz,

and so we can turn light on and off very controllably, very

selectively, and we designed resins

that can be selectively photopolymerized.

And we can very rapidly print layer after layer,

and print a whole layer at once at the resolution

of SLA technology.

So most of these mirrors are spaced out

about 16 microns apart in one of the machines

by the time you have your throw angle down onto a part.

It's a little larger than that, so in x and y

we've got feature sizes in the 20 to 75 micron range.

And then in the z-axis we can make

that as finely resolute as we'd like, or as large as we'd like.

And that dictates a lot of the print speed of our parts.

We've come up with some really interesting

post-processing techniques.

A part of our process involved only partially

curing this layer, so that when the next layer comes on,

we get this full chemical covalent cure.

And so we've got some very interesting

post-processing steps that help solidify these properties.

But at the end of the day, instead of providing materials,

or providing printers, we're really

working with large companies to provide solutions

to underlying problems.

So for instance, with Halliburton, they've

got some needs for very specific geometries

in their downhole completions team.

So they need plastic parts that can essentially

help keep wells open or help close up wells.

We need parts that have a high strain capacity,

but have a high toughness, and have

to be in pretty complex shapes.

And so those are the kinds of things that we like to tackle.

So what we can do is we can replace polymers

where you'd normally use rubbers,

nylons, for a host of different markets

that you see pictured here.

And by controlling the monomer concentration, some

of the processing characteristics,

and a host of the additives, we've got a huge range.

As you can see up here in the little profile,

we've got a lot of different parts

that I'll play around with.

One of the things that we spend a lot of time on

is we play with internal structure in 3D printed parts.

So here you'll see six little wafers

of the exact same material, but the effective stiffness

of these materials ranges dramatically.

So here's something that's fairly stiff,

but it's also not very dense.

It's got near the stiffness of a solid part,

but because of how this lattice structure is created,

a lot of the stresses are translated linearly

through the part, and so we've got a very stiff material.

We've got other ones that have the exact same density,

but by having different internal geometries,

we have a huge range in the effective stiffness

of these parts.

So by being able to selectively control internal geometries

during this 3D printing, we can do a lot of things

with the same material.

And then by changing materials, we've

got a huge parameter space to play with.

Here's some little Androids we printed for you guys just

for today.

They also have little microchips that

are embedded in their heads, so you

can download a little TagWriter app and scan over them

and they'll say something fun to you guys,

if you want to come try it out a little bit later.

Here's some dragons that we've also printed.

And so you can get a sense of some of the feature sizes

that we get.

These belong to a class of materials

that we've done a lot of research

in the lab, which are close to materials called shape memory

polymers.

So these happen to be materials called viscoelastomers,

or they're materials that are in this transition state.

So you can see that when I deform this dragon's wings,

they're sort of slowly starting to recover.

Well what we can do and what our lab back at UT Dallas

focuses on, is these materials called shape memory polymers.