0:00 The following presentation is by Renee Madell of Promis on molding the future computational design in footwware tooling. Okay. Hello. Good morning everyone. Thank you for the invitation. Thank you Duann for the organization. Thank you all for coming. Good to see you again. Model in the future it’s about how we are using computational design for footware tooling specifically I will do a promise introduction from is the company that I work for and then I will go deeper into the shank and some other interesting things about combining hybrid or combining traditional technology in this hybrid system CNC and additive manufacturing and how we are using it for mold optimization and fabrication.

1:07 So, Frammas is a German company. Our headquarters is in Pyramisense, a very small town. Maybe you know, maybe you don’t. But we have many locations around the world. Mass production is happening mostly in Asia. We also have offices in the US. Since 75 years, we are working with these startups. Some of you are our customers. So, and we do basically plastic components for the footwear industry, mostly for high performance, but we do all kind of things for the footware industry.

1:48 We don’t make the full shoe. So, don’t ask me for samples the full shoe. You can see some samples on the table. About some parts parts like a shank. This is a shank. Traditionally, it’s a part which is used as a reinforcement. To give some support on your feet. It could be a wooden shank, it could be a leather shank or metallic. And it’s functional. It started with the horse riding boots, but nowadays it’s still used for giving support to the art support to the arch of your feet.

2:26 And this is not a shank. This is also not a building. I mean it could be but it’s not. So it’s a nice structure this ADMS then I will show you more about this but we use it for to make a real shank. So as you can see here then you can you can watch you can see this on the on the table. This is the the shank we’re using for comolding with our traditional materials.

2:59 I will go back to that later. But first I want to say that this is coming from your human body. So it’s about taking your anatomy and using the technology to improve how we do footwear. So how made shoes are made using technology at that time was I put this because it was a Dutch guy who invented this lasting machine. And talking about lasting, what we need to start is the last the shoe last.

3:31 I showed this last year in Berlin, but I’m I’m showing it again just to tell you that now we’re not thinking about the inside of the last, but talking about the we’re thinking about the the outside as an structure. So the minimal surfacing for latises now we’re using it not only for the product itself or the last but for the moment. So, as you can see on the table, this is orange shoast.

3:59 This was made last week using this mold. I’m not saying now shoas should be foamy or but it’s lighter, it’s foamy, it’s flexible, it has many advantages compared to the traditional way of shoe last making that maybe you you know. The cool thing is about 3MF. I know I have a bonus to mention 3MF and it’s amazing what we can do regarding the file optimization. Now the files are amazingly light.

4:39 So the full project it’s below 10 megabytes or 8 megaby is amazing to create all these structures. But when I begin researching on this, I was using much more volume. So printing more powder or material using more energy and that’s not the way. So I started reducing the model by manual optimization but trying to do it more conformal because molding or tooling in mold making is really coming from a big block and reducing it.

5:18 By subtracting material but now we have additive manufacturing. Therefore we should think the other way around starting from the object or the geometry and make the mold around. But at that point I I didn’t succeed that much because this structor was more than 1.5 gigabyte. So that was really not so easy to handle. But it was good to prove that we can do overcasting using 3D printed parts with foam casting in a functional part.

5:52 This is for safety shoes. So we integrated the toe cup the foam midsole. So lightweight and strong and now using metal additive manufacturing the the powdering is more simple. Sometimes it’s it would be a nightmare to do the depository. But another cool feature about adaptive density minimal surfacing is that you have this dual domain. So you can use it for cooling for example. Cooling is a big topic for us in injection molding because every cycle you need to cool it down and maybe it’s a couple of seconds but if you consider we’re talking about million of pairs every second counts and now the plan I’m I’m not showing this maybe next year but the plan is to use the ADMS not only for light waving light weight saving but also for cooling cooling channels because traditional Ally the most making is like this.

7:00 A lot of as I said metal blocks 200 400 kilos of aluminum or steel and a lot of parts everything is CNC mills or lathe so it’s always subtractive and the complexity here for all the mechanisms and everything is really yeah it’s a hard thing to do But at the end you have some parts that now we can do in a different way. And these are the cooling channels that traditionally are really orthogonal but now with the latis structure we could do them more even more adaptive or conformal.

7:49 Just to have a reference if we do if we use CNC milling it’s a lot of time it’s a lot of energy. Kilowatt hours running for weeks. Our CNC machines it takes a lot of kilowatts. So it’s a lot of energy. And using any kind of 3D printing or additive manufacturing we will reduce not only the material consumption but also the energy consumption. That’s why we are taking for example texturing using laser to not reveal the full mold but just to scratch the surface because we are talking about molds or hundreds of molds that they are being disposed.

8:41 So to avoid that we need to do some upycling and engraving it will be laser or just printing some inserts or parts to replace this. So for doing that we’re doing this texturing obviously in the digital way. So for not only for laser texturing but also for 3D printing. So in this case botcha is for foot footware design integrated with grasshopper. We can do really good wrapping using the UV qualities of Rhino.

9:22 And again lightweighting I really enjoy not only the lightweight of this by the way this is just 3 MF drag and drop into the PowerPoint and it’s running smoothly because SA is working very well on the meshing. So these measures are even draft quality not high high quality but good enough not only for showing you but also for printing. So the 3MF file, the full midsole we are casting today or tomorrow in Germany.

9:51 We are using this new mold construction. So it’s all about serings inside and everything is only six parts and magic is taking everything completely. Here you can see the slicing inside will be the midsole the foam. So we are doing the foam casting inside. It’s just pouring. So it’s an open model. Then we close it. It’s very simple. But it’s a pleasure to have some light files.

10:28 So we used this last year to show in the desma affair again to prove this part in this case the shank you know it’s in between. So we do overcasting. So they injected also as you can see also on the table. We injected traditionally with traditional mold molds coming from Vietnam. Now we have them in Germany and we did everything for the co molding. So co molding injected TPU with 3D printed TPU using this liquid TPU.

11:03 So everything is the same family. So for recycling that will be perfect because we can spread all everything together. And the exploration started different shapes combining the shank with the heel reinforcement. It’s a heel part that as beams beam latising was not that good. So then we decided to go with ADMS because even we need to support them with some pins in inside the mold to hold them in place.

11:38 So you cannot even see the pin holders because it’s hidden on the latis structure. So this is the the shank. It’s not a big deal, but now we’re doing it in a very different way. It’s not wooden. It’s not metal part. And we successfully implemented everything together. But before running the printing part, you did some simulation with intact inside Grasshopper. I’m not a FA expert or analysis geek.

12:15 So, but even I can do this u simulation. It’s really simple with just a grasshopper definition given by intact solutions. And you can load different materials and simulate what are the loads on different part. So you can see how this is bending. This is just a very simple stress analysis. Nothing fancy. But it’s working and it’s working super fast. You can see this is real time. Dan did a fast forward version just in one minute you can see the full process but this is a real time and for someone who’s not an expert it’s really easy to work with so we showed this last year in New York in Brooklyn I was really happy to to share this with the guys and as I said this was a collaboration between Germany our colleagues in Hong in China, in Vietnam.

13:20 So, part of the group, we were all working on this. Now we have the most in in Germany. And this year we did a modification and you know in footwware industry modifications are our daily business. So, customers usually come with some oh can you do this modification? Of course we can do but this is internal modifications because now we wanted to to modify instead of direct soling we wanted to adapt this to make it for cementing for gluing.

14:00 So I did a product notification and we succeed doing the doing this for our tutorial workshop in Portland using Valina. You can see the test you can smell it. This is a cinnamon smell and Valina is this bio series called the material. It’s very similar to TPU. It’s not high performance but we can inject it as well and again commolding directly the 3D printed part the injected part everything foam but now these white parts are 3D printed it’s a aluminum mold but combined with additive manufacturing this is the hybrid system I was talking about and everything with liquid TPU we can have this final result and we shipped this to Portland And the people there was really happy to work with this bottom unit and they did the the uppers and the cementing.

14:59 So at the end the m modification was super accurate, super easy to do. Sadly we did this with the honeycombs. So it’s lighter but you know honeycoms is only one direction so it’s not isotropic. But then I went for more research doing the not only Honeycom but also TPMS. So TPMS is also fine but ADMS is better. So with ADMS we can really as I said not only improve the strength but also we save a lot of material energy etc.

15:47 And at the end, not because of the mold, but at the end, in total, we reduce around 20%. The weight, so it’s much lighter. And everyone was really happy in Portland. So they work with on this. We provided the last and the bottom units and they did the rest the rest with our tutorial mentorship. So the last thing is a project foot loop that we showed in Milan this year together with Unrait and Valena Jesus is there you can talk to him.

16:24 We did this very interesting project which is a concept about circularity in footwork. So how can we inject some materials that those are composable? So at the end you can really disassemble the shoe and compose it. So the at the end of life the user is responsible to do the afterlife cycle and recycle this but it’s not real recycling. It’s down cycling and it’s basically composing because you know recycling in footwear is not working.

17:03 Only 5% of the shoes are being recycled. So that’s not the way for doing that. I al I was also exploring some super simple ways to do the flaps for bonding and everything. The project was super cool. Again, this was to show the concept. We’re not there ready with the full development to have a final solution, but we had a lot of fun. So and and and we were talking about this.

17:34 This is important for the industry because some brands are now looking the circularity like like the real way to go. And last year I also finished with this one. But now I think not we are not only kids drawing shows shoes sorry. But after foot loop I saw so many kids so interested in what we were doing. And now I I really positively positively think that the new generations are thinking not only about drawing but 3D printing and doing much more and better designs.

18:16 So, thank you. This is my last jump. To learn more about the CDFAM computational design symposium series, to see the archives of previous presentations, and to learn about future events, visit CDFAM.com.