CT-ubiquity

Having recently garnered success with its latest round of Series B funding, Lumafield is still a new player. Yet, it’s already breaking through in its mission to make industrial CT scanning affordable and accessible, as Lumafield Co-founder and Head of Product Andreas Bastian, and Head of Marketing Jon Bruner recently told TCT.

Bastian is quick to provide a useful analogy familiar with the additive manufacturing (AM) world: “It’s similar to how industrial metal printing has behaved over the past couple of decades: the technology has been around for a while, but it’s very expensive, difficult to use; kind of a fragmented tool chain. So, what we’re trying to do is take the technology and make it dramatically more accessible so that any engineer, anywhere in the world, can use it to solve problems.”

And that’s exactly what Lumafield is doing, validated by users such as L'Oreal, Trek, and Saucony. Its flagship Neptune industrial scanner is much smaller than conventional CT scanners for medical or industrial applications. Powered by AI, the scanner takes up to thousands of two-dimensional pictures and assembles these into a 3D model that can be easily manipulated. For instance, the nature of CT technology means that it’s a simple affair to only show parts of a certain density range. A recent update has also increased the speed of the scanner by over 300 times. A big point for its accessibility lies with the software. It’s no longer necessary to build a ‘supercomputer’ specifically to analyse your parts, because Lumafield’s software runs in web browsers, meaning any ordinary computer can effectively use it.

ACHIEVING CT-UBIQUITY

“Aerospace,” Bruner said, “is the one field where CT scanning is broadly used as a major product development and production tool.” Until now. Most industries have not conventionally relied on analysing parts with CT scans, largely because it’s an expensive, time-consuming process. However, with the aim of providing more accessible and affordable CT scanning, Lumafield opens the door to a wide range of industries, some of which are unexpected.

“Folks in the performance footwear space have gotten interested in CT because it gives them deep insight and an ability to measure product performance in a way that they couldn't before. Before adopting CT, the state-of-the-art was using a bandsaw to cut a shoe in half, which is fundamentally destructive and it made it difficult to understand wear over time,” Bastian explained, adding that an unexpected perk of working for a CT scanning company that runs such easy-to-use analyses is that you can scan practically anything you want. “We actually have an engineer in the office who's training for a marathon, and he's been studying the degradation of his shoes. He puts about 90 miles on them per week, and scans them repeatedly over time to look at compression of the sole. This kind of time-series analysis simply isn't possible when you're cutting shoes apart to measure them.”

Bastian noted some of his personal favourite scans are anything organic: “A pomegranate is really fascinating, seeing the actual internal structure of the pomegranate is really interesting. There’s a lot of structure and symmetry that you don’t get to see when you take it apart.”

THE ADDITIVE ADVANTAGE

According to Bruner, additive manufacturing and the use of scanning as a process development tool was “one of the founding theses” for the company: “As manufacturers introduce new manufacturing processes, they need ways to verify and validate them, and to understand those processes and to understand the outcomes of those processes in their products,” Bruner elaborated. “Whether that’s additive manufacturing, which is really still in the early stages of adoption at large manufacturers, or the processes that go into electric cars involving handling very delicate batteries and assembling them and wiring them together and that kind of thing.”

CT scanning has many advantages for the AM industry, offering unique insights into new parts or manufacturing processes. Lumafield has developed powerful quantitative analysis tools for defects such as porosity voids in parts. Pore volume, sphericity and distance to the surface are among the details that can be assessed with CT. Other areas include analysis of dimensional distortion, warp distortion, support material and part interactions.

Bastian added that Lumafield’s qualitative analysis tools enable users to identify areas of trapped powder, and better understand support structure and part interactions for AM parts.

“We’ve seen a of wide range of problems solved by folks using our technology to study their additively manufactured parts, spanning both process development all the way through to part characterisation,” Bastian said.

LOOKING AHEAD

The scans show a brightly illuminated future for Lumafield, making strides in the fields of AI-powered software, cloud-based user interface and the hardware that powers it all. It comes down to the company’s core:

“We are fundamentally systems engineers that build these capabilities from a first principles engineering philosophy, so it’s a really deeply integrated system that we’re constantly evolving, constantly advancing,” Bastian said. “There’s some really exciting technology that lets us make the hardware more and more accessible from both the usability and the cost perspective. There’s a lot of very exciting algorithm developments on the back end to make all of this automatable and scalable. And then there’s really exciting graphics works that goes on to actually let users interact with CT data in the browser, which is really not something that’s been available before. Moving all of this onto the cloud is really exciting because this allows anybody in the world to immediately, instantly interact with this data.”

It’s a modern approach to a modern niche: world-wide access to in-depth analysis of the most thorough kind. When Wilhelm Roentgen accidentally discovered X-rays in 1895, the potential must have already seemed endless, yet access to such an advanced version of that technology, even for small businesses and manufacturers, must have seemed fantastical. Yet, here is Lumafield, breaking open the market and peering deep through its composition and substance.

This article was originally written as a feature for TCT magazine Volume 30, Issue 6, which you can read here.