Wind is plentiful.
It's just waiting to be captured and harnessed.
Wind is our fuel.
We see it as a sustainable source for reliable energy.
As a renewables company
Vestas has a high stake when it comes to sustainability
and carbon footprint reduction.
Vestas is the world's largest wind turbine manufacturer globally.
Our mission is to drive the world towards renewable energy.
We have design elements that are kind of scattered around the globe.
We have a centralized team in India,
people in Denmark, in the United Kingdom,
and here in the US.
We could be having a part shipped from Germany to the United States.
In terms of sustainability,
that is a substantial amount of fuel and time and resources.
The solution to that is Direct Digital Manufacturing,
or as we call it, DDM.
We've equipped all of our blade manufacturing facilities with Markforged printers
to have a rapid response to an ever-changing product.
We use it for instantaneous validation of design concepts.
We use it for collaboration.
We use it to free our manufacturing processes
from the constraints of outside suppliers.
With DDM we don't compromise.
What we've done to kind of flip the script is,
we're no longer just providing the instructions,
we're providing the physical article
in near real time.
It's the closest thing to teleportation I think you can get.
Blacksmith has been mission critical
for us to enable the functionality and the capability
of inspection and calibration of a tool
during the manufacturing process.
Our blades being ultra high up
in inclement weather environments,
they're prone to lightning strikes.
So we incorporate a proprietary lightning protection system
called a "lightning tip receptor".
Conventionally, just for the geometric aspects,
something like this would be CNC'd
out of a cheaper material like aluminum.
The validation of that geometry
in the fit and form and function,
that could take weeks.
We can validate this the same day as the design
and we could iterate numerous times.
We could test one concept after the other.
And then we can print the same exact design
out of actual copper.
You can't do that with conventional manufacturing.
This is one half of the tool that's called
the TC marking tool, or "Top Center Marking Tool".
It's used to place a witness mark
or an indicator mark
on our blades for the assembly process
when it gets out to the field and goes up tower.
So if the blade is out of clock position
by even one and a half degrees,
that could result in a catastrophic failure.
So we need to assure from manufacturing
that we provide our colleagues in construction and assembly
proper features to be able to align the blade to.
A tool like this,
the typical validation process
it would have to be taken to each physical specimen
or each physical blade type
to be checked.
Well with this,
it manufactures the part,
performs the Blacksmith in-process inspection and calibration
so we guarantee repeatability every single time.
We have full control over that because
we know exactly what constituents, what inputs
are going into the manufacturing process of that part.
Now we can also generate actual calibration reports from it
and I can now stamp that part,
that it is in fact calibrated for use.
We can automatically generate this and populate it
as well as a standard deviation and a heat map
of what happened with that physical part
and then automatically upload that
to our enterprise asset management system.
So, this all happens inside the Markforged X7
and inside of Eiger and Blacksmith.
With Markforged, the Blacksmith system,
with the spirit of DDM,
we can circumvent supply chain issues,
and do it all in one go.
We can manufacture,
calibrate,
and generate a calibration report
all in the time that it takes to manufacture the part.
Markforged was selected because
they were the most capable
to provide the end-to-end solution
we knew we had to have.
It is a closed loop system;
it's a closed ecosystem.
Materials, machine, software, all of it --
it's all encompassing.
With the Eiger and Markforged platform,
we can digitally store the instructions
and manufacturing parameters
in the cloud,
and then we simply print that article,
that tool or part
when we need it.
It's a conventional FDM 3D printing technology
but it incorporates so much more
with directional fiber in the composites.
And then we have the added capability of metals.
It's a full suite of manufacturing.
We use the API integration aspect of the Eiger Fleet system.
We use RBAC, roll-based access control,
we use single sign-on,
multi-factor authentication,
all of the added functionality of Fleet.
We use every single aspect of it.
Another function within Eiger Fleet is custom analytics.
We can custom tailor specific KPI's performance indicators
and metrics that we want to measure.
What's important to us as an organization to understand.
What is the impact?
What is the the dollar value?
What is the ROI?
The user has to input
what was the original cost of the part,
the original wait,
the original lead time,
and then we could use those for business analysis.
All of those things are key metrics for us to understand:
Is this successful as a concept?
We've been able to deploy these systems
to places where people hadn't even seen 3D printers.
You know, we can put them in factories where
there's no core competencies around additive at all,
provide them with about three hours of training on,
this is how you take care of the machine
this is how you load material
and the printers are making parts with no problem.
We're essentially putting the power of manufacturing
into the hands of our end users,
democratizing manufacturing
while maintaining a centralized engineering control model.
We can almost eliminate a lot of our supply chain related carbon footprint.
Conventionally, this tool would take three weeks to manufacture.
With DDM, Direct Digital Manufacturing,
from design to printing,
assembling,
and putting into the hands of production for validation
was three days.
We were immediately able to post it for global use.
So Markforged and the Digital Forge platform,
is manufacturing without borders
and without limits.
It is a game changer in manufacturing.