🔒OPM shapes the future of 3D printing

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Oxford Performance Materials Inc. is making precision parts that can replace bone in humans and aluminum in aircraft.

It's making the parts through additive manufacturing, or 3D printing, using a material formed from the molecule polyetherketoneketone, or PEKK.

“We live for this molecule,” says Scott DeFelice, OPM's founder and CEO.

The company describes PEKK as an ultra high-performance thermoplastic technology that has myriad business uses, including for biomedical implants and aerospace, two OPM focus areas.

PEKK is in a class of polymers that DeFelice describes as atop the polymer food chain. OPM adapted the polymer — first created by DuPont, which abandoned it in 2000 — and advanced its commercial use with 3D printing.

“We looked at that and said, 'Gosh, we could work with that molecule and subsequently develop novel materials and processes around it that would be proprietary and really valuable in some interesting markets, such as medical, aerospace, semiconductor, and chemical-process industries,' because the polymer itself has a very sort of unique set of attributes,” DeFelice says.

The PEKK polymer is biocompatible, temperature resistant, chemically pure, strong and light, he added.

“When you have that basic list of attributes, what we often say to our customers is, 'Now we can 3D print with it, which means we can put it in any complex shape you like, very efficiently,' ” he says.

OPM uses lasers to precisely sculpt the parts made from PEKK material in the additive manufacturing process.

OPM, for example, makes globally distributed, FDA-approved cranial implants for patients with skull loss from disease or injury that are precise replacements of the original bone, using medical images to model the new part for 3D printing.

OPM has received approval for facial bone replacements that it expects to begin selling this summer.

“And then we're sort of moving down the body,” DeFelice says of the company's plans to produce jaw and spinal implants with products that he says are mechanically similar to bone and onto which bone grows.

“That's completely unique in terms of polymers — no other material does that,” he says. “If the bone grows onto the implant, then the implant stays fixed into place.”

The material also has broad implications for the aerospace industry, replacing aluminum and magnesium with parts that are lighter, cheaper, and precise, he says.

OPM just completed two contracts with NASA and Northrop Gruman to produce parts for satellite and defense programs. DeFelice also expects business to take off for commercial aviation; the company makes parts for undersea use as well.

OPM currently occupies two 15,000-square-foot buildings in South Windsor, one for biomedical use, the other for aerospace. Growth is driving plans to add a 100,000-square-foot facility, for which OPM is receiving offers from around the world, DeFelice says.

“Connecticut is our home right now and we're going to make every possible effort to just stay where we are,” he says.

The company has 40 employees — including mechanical, chemical, biomedical and structural engineers and polymer scientists — and DeFelice envisions growing to 200 in the next few years.

John Puziss, director of technology licensing in the Office of Cooperative Research at the Yale University School of Medicine, says OPM's technology is innovative.

“The idea that this technology can be used to very rapidly create customized implants for surgical patients is pretty amazing,” Puziss says.

Puziss helped to negotiate an agreement between Yale and OPM that establishes the possibility for numerous collaborations between Yale faculty and OPM in disciplines such as biomedicine and engineering.

“We would expect that these collaborations could lead to a number of other very novel applications for this technology,” Puziss says.

Mike Notarangelo, an audit senior manager at Grant Thornton LLP, the company's independent audit firm, says OPM's work is impressive.

“My experience has been working with many traditional manufacturing companies and when I first walked into OPM and began to understand the method that they apply in their production processes and saw what they were capable of producing for output, I was blown away,” Notarangelo says. “OPM is manufacturing products today that weren't even envisioned as being possible 20 years ago and weren't possible 10 years ago. Today they do it on a daily basis.”

Then there is the impact of OPM's products, including improving patients' quality of life or making airplanes more agile and cheaper to produce, which makes them more fuel efficient and environmentally friendly, he says.

“They're just starting to scratch the surface,” Notarangelo said. “The potential is limitless — so when you talk about innovation, that's really what it is, that's the crux of it.”

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