3D printing technologies can enable the quick manufacture of virtually any plastic or metal replacement part for practically anything you’d need a spare part for. This has always been the promise of 3D printing but hurdles stand in the way: How do companies keep people from printing and selling their parts? How do they ensure the quality of a 3D printed part? And how do they keep people from modifying their part files, potentially leading to legal liability should a part fail?
A new online platform that connects original equipment manufacturers, buyers, and 3D printing service providers may have the answer.
Tech start-up Autentica Industrial Platforms is launching a web portal called Autentica Carparts, where design owners or OEMs sell spare parts as digital 3D printable files to authorized dealers and repair centers using digital non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to certify that a buyer is purchasing a genuine OEM replacement part. The NFT is streamed directly to a local partnering 3D printing service for on-demand fabrication according to predetermined specifications.
Autentica is starting with car parts because OEMs in this industry have the most available digital files, but expects to expand to platforms for aerospace, consumer goods, marine, and defense, with the sky as the limit, says CEO Irma Gilbert.
Gilbert, a Portuguese businesswoman who emigrated to the UK has experience with manufacturing and needing spare parts. She came up with the idea for Autentica and pitched it to e-commerce platforms, such as Amazon Web Services and Google, but they didn’t bite. Software giant Oracle, however, was intrigued. In 2020, Gilbert workshopped the idea with Oracle’s blockchain, cybersecurity, and cloud teams in Paris. Soon after the University of Sheffield Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre came on board and the project received funding from Innovate UK, the UK’s national innovation agency.
For consumers and spare part businesses, this method ensures faster delivery of spares at possibly a lower cost. For OEMs, it solves a host of problems, ranging from the high cost of spare part storage, maintenance, and shipping to sustainability issues around part over-production.
“We see many digital inventories popping up, but building trust is not enough,” says Gilbert. Layers upon layers of cyber security and digital authenticity are what will drive manufacturers’ inventories to become digital.
Autentica Carparts is built on a blockchain-based cloud infrastructure that maintains OEMs’ digital inventory as well as qualified additive manufacturing processes and materials to fabricate the parts.
Here’s how 3D printing NFTs work with Autentica:
- The OEM or designer creates a 3D printable digital file for a specific object or design and uploads it to Autentica, where it’s verified as printable and meeting quality standards.
- Then OEM then “mints” the NFT, which means adding information about the 3D printable file, its ownership, and any associated metadata, such as a description, printing instructions, and a preview image.
- Autentica “tokenizes” the file by creating it as an NFT on a blockchain platform that supports NFTs, like Ethereum. This NFT will represent ownership or access rights to the digital file.
- When someone purchases the NFT, access rights to the 3D printable file are streamed to custom hardware at a 3D printing service bureau or other fabrication facility that’s connected directly to 3D printers.
- The 3D printing service sets the price for the item and delivers it to the customer.
Using an NFT to transfer a 3D printable file provides a high degree ownership verification and authenticity. Yet it does not inherently prevent someone from 3D printing the file more than once, printing it to different specifications, or using different materials. For this, Autentica has what it calls a black box. This piece of hardware from Huawei sits at the 3D printing service bureau — or the part dealer if they’re printing in-house — and connects directly to the 3D printer or its workflow software.
“The black box creates a gateway between the cloud and the machine because that’s the only way you can protect the file transfer to the machine,” says Gilbert. 3D printing service bureaus and anyone else 3D printing the files need to be TÜV certified. TÜV or Technical Inspection Association is primarily based in Germany and known for inspecting, testing, and certifying various products, systems, and services to ensure they meet specific quality, safety, and environmental standards.
The Right To Repair
Autentica’s e-commerce marketplace for 3D printing approach is to make it easy for customers to order parts and ensure that they don’t need any knowledge of 3D printing. Gilbert says she’s in talks now with LG consumer appliances about their program to provide consumers with the right to repair. A white-label version of Autentica is a possibility, Gilbert says.
“The customer buys the 3D prints of genuine parts using their credit card or debit cards, then the 3D printer service provider receives the token to print the file,” says Gilbert. Service providers and their equipment are certified upfront to receive a black box. OEMs subscribe to the platform at various package levels and Autentica then turns their digital files into into NFTs.
Autentica will launch Nov. 1 with a handful of parts and service provider partners, including UK-based 3DGbire. Gilbert will present the concept at the 2023 Digital Spare Parts Conference on Nov. 23 in Germany and is hoping to lure Nissan and Ford to upload their entire inventory.
According to its website, the Autentica platform will enable instant access to spare car parts compared to the industry standard of 28 days, reduce non-production costs, such as storage by 70%, and slash the carbon footprint of transportation by 40%.
Gilbert’s goal is nothing short of challenging the power of manufacturing. She has her sites set on expanding globally and is looking to partner with more companies in other industries on smart supply chain management through additive manufacturing.
“How can we change manufacturing mindset and how we produce and consume?” asks Gilbert. “Why are we bringing parts in from China or India, and what if everyone has a printer and can make what they need when they need it. That’s how we’ll change manufacturing.”
License: The text of "Autentica’s Ambitious Goal: The Amazon for 3D Printing Digital Files" by All3DP Pro is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.