Raymond Weitekamp, Founder of PolySpectra, joins Cheddar Innovates to discuss how he — a former 3D-printing hater — creates ultra-durable 3D-printed plastic material for the automotive, medical, aerospace, and electrical industries.

Cheddar Innovates

How This Former 3D-Printing Hater is Now Shaking Up the Industry

Mhm. Welcome back to Cheddar innovates brought to you by curiosity stream, three D. Printing has the potential to disrupt so many industries, but three D. Printed objects are not always the strongest or the most durable. That's why our next guest, a world class scientist. Technical leader and entrepreneur created a three D printing solution for the automative, medical, aerospace and electric industries joining us now Raymond way to camp. Founder of policy Spectra, thanks so much for being here. What's the mission of polish spectra. And how are you turning these ideas into reality with three D. Printing? Yeah, thank you so much for having me on this show. Yeah our our mission. We call the massless mission and This is to reduce the global energy usage by 25% by the year 2050 using distributed digital manufacturing. And so to your point earlier, that's really only possible when you can directly additive, we manufacture products that are durable enough to be safe to use uh and higher performing than traditional manufacturing methods. And you weren't initially the biggest fan of three D. Printing. So what were some of the gaps in the market that you wanted to target? Mhm. Yeah. So when when I was getting my PhD at caltech and studying polymer chemistry and material science, I at that time really thought that three D. Printing was kind of silly and um wasn't particularly useful and was kind of a hater, so to speak. And what we realized was that this new class of materials that we had invented because we could now make materials that were incredibly durable and resilient and could be safe to use in end use products and could actually take three d printing from prototyping to manufacturing. I kind of ended up turning turning that negativity on its head and basically dedicating, you know, the last Basically 10 years of my career to bringing advanced materials to 3D printing and we mentioned you work in a number of different sectors, automative, medical, aerospace, electric industries. What are some of those three D printing applications that most people might not be aware of? Sure. Yeah, well in terms of what's out there today, uh one thing that's kind of behind the scenes that three D printing is doing today, our jewelry manufacturing, audiology. So um printing, hearing aids for example, it's widely used in making dental products. So there are a few kind of niche things where it is useful today. What we're really working on um that's relevant to all of those markets that you you mentioned, you know, automotive, aerospace, um robotics etcetera is these sort of very very high performance materials that can also be, you know, computational e optimized. So this this um material uh this shape is done with a process called topology optimization and this can actually serve as you know effectively a metal replacement for for many applications. So there's still a long road to go in terms of people starting to use true production, additive manufacturing of end use parts and you know that will take time. But the foundation of that has to be you know, durable, safe, rugged materials. Raymond, just about a minute left with you. What do you see for the future of 3D printing? So what I really see as the future is what what I would call distributed digital manufacturing. And there's a lot of different ways of thinking about this. But the simplest way of saying it is that this will be a world where we are on demand manufacturing what we want in the shape that we want it as close to the end user of that product as possible. And so you could imagine that from a customer experience perspective it would be a lot like amazon Prime, you know, we have infinite choice and one day shipping. But those products were things that you know were manufactured on demand locally next to the user. So you have sort of a virtual inventory. Yeah. Yes, so good to have you on the show. Thank you so much. That's Raymond way to camp founder of Policy Spectra