AREVO produces lightweight carbon fiber products with cutting-edge manufacturing and digital techniques. Carbon fiber manufacturing is typically an expensive process due to the number of processes and resources required to reach a desired strength. AREVO eliminates the barrier to producing lightweight and strong carbon fiber with its unique approach and focus on flexibility and customizability.
AREVO produces Continuous CFRP, carbon-fiber-reinforced polymers, composite products at its locations in California, Japan, and Vietnam through the combination of innovations in material sciences, robotics, design, and manufacturing software. With production happening across the globe, AREVO turned to (ION) to provide collaboration and real-time understanding of their 3D printing workflows.
CHALLENGE//
- Integrate AREVO’s growing fleet of 3D printers to coordinate highly-customized manufacturing
- Integrate with a flexible, cloud-based PLM, Duro PLM
- Rapidly manufacturing highly-customized products across multiple factories across the globe
RESULT//
2 weeks to integrate 3D printers with (ION)
Integrating 3D printers in 2 weeks
When the AREVO team discovered (ION) in 2020, they breathed a sigh of relief having found a factory operating system that enabled them to iterate quickly and be as flexible as their business model. With (ION)’s open API based on GraphQL, AREVO’s software team was ready to plug in. With the API, the AREVO team was able to integrate their machines fast. Within 2 weeks and minimal developers across systems and machine software development, AREVO had integrated their 3D printing machines with (ION) for automatic job routing, printing, and status communication. The API browser built into the (ION) application gave AREVO’s manufacturing and software teams common grounds to explore the API and rapidly test their automation from right within the app.
(ION)’s ability to effortlessly integrate with existing software platforms using the API keeps implementation time down. This helps AREVO to bring on new teammates and plug in any machine with ease on the way to make the world lighter. "(ION)'s simplicity and easy-to-understand API helped us implement and start using it within a few weeks" says Software Engineer, Sohil Nandu.
Getting parts data from Duro PLM
In addition to getting their machines connected within weeks, AREVO has up-to-date part information from Duro PLM for their automated manufacturing processes automatically. This is because ion has a first-class integration with Duro. Given both ion and Duro are modern, cloud-based systems, connecting the systems was a breeze for AREVO. As AREVO’s design engineering team works primarily in their CAD and PLM (Duro), (ION)’s Duro integration keeps their manufacturing and operations team up-to-date automatically on any changes made in engineering. This up-to-date and reliable data flow has been a huge win for Duro.
Data-driven manufacturing and continuous design improvement
With data flowing from design into manufacturing and back to ion, AREVO engineers can quickly query print data such as efficiency, print time, and granular statistics on how a print ran. If a printed product needs closer examination, AREVO engineers can quickly find the run in ion and know exactly how the print happened down to the material lot number used. Using ion’s analytics engine, AREVO engineers are able to build all kinds of reports, such as production and quality reports, to use the data and insights to continuously improve their design and manufacturing processes.
AREVO’s fully automated production line is on the way - they are working on an in-house integration with ion that will help operators reduce mistakes and work with their machines better than ever. In time, AREVO will be able to select prints straight from a screen, and their ion-integrated machines will take care of the rest, eliminating manually-input print files altogether. They plan to manufacture highly customized 3D printed parts from design to production, and they plan to use ion for the maintenance of the 3D printers themselves. With ion's connectivity, AREVO can monitor, iterate on, and improve its growing 3D printing operation better and faster than ever, even from across the globe.
"When you automate, you remove the potential for human error… It's just so much better." - Sohil Nandu