Design First, Manufacturing Second: How PECM Enables Design Agency for Manufacturers
- Kirk Abolafia
- Oct 2
- 5 min read
PECM’s distinctive material removal capabilities open new design freedom for manufacturers empowering engineers to achieve features and geometries that were previously impractical or cost-prohibitive. To learn the PECM fundamentals, check out our other content. A key setback from the continued reliance on legacy manufacturing processes is not just how they hinder manufacturers from scaling production to meet demand, but by fundamentally inhibiting design agency for engineers. The narrative of ambitious design teams reallocating time and resources to reworking the designs they worked hard to create in order to fit within the limited constraints of legacy material removal processes is increasingly commonplace as design innovations are seemingly outpacing machining methods in critical industries, notably aerospace, medical, energy and semiconductors.
However, many companies are beginning to adopt a much earlier cadence for design-for-manufacturability considerations in the product development cycle, as they realize how many technical, financial or scalability bottlenecks often emerge downstream otherwise. From microfluidic channels in semiconductors to high-aspect-ratio cooling features in turbine blades on aircraft, a variety of extremely critical parts rely on both the continued innovations of design engineers and the scalability of existing manufacturing processes to make those designs a reality. In doing so, many key manufacturers are also increasingly aware of alternative processes like pulsed electrochemical machining (PECM) as a powerful means to enable new possibilities at scale.
PECM is more than a process, it’s a tool that enable our customers to better marry the aspirations of design engineers with market needs for scalability. In this article, we’ll discuss the severe costs of design re-iterations to satisfy legacy processes, and how PECM’s unique material removal capabilities can enable increased design agency for manufacturers, thereby allowing engineers to pursue features and geometries otherwise impossible or uneconomical.
The Cost of Design Re-iterations
Excessive design re-iterations to meet legacy processes’ needs can incur significant financial setbacks: one study estimated the average cost of design reworking efforts in key manufacturing industries to be around 12.5% of sales, while also finding that profits could increase by 13% if reworking efforts were reduced by 50%. Within the company, these design stalls can lead to increased labor costs, increased scrap rates (notable when dealing with exotic materials like nitinol or tungsten) and heighten tooling costs. Outside of the company, excessive design re-iterations can also delay product launches, potentially allowing competitors to take increased market share.
Even innovations in the manufacturing processes themselves are not always adequately keeping pace with design innovations; additive manufacturing (AM) has enabled new levels of complexity and customizability into critical part design, but often still requires intensive post-processing to achieve the surface quality and tolerances necessary for performance (notably in high-intensity or heat-flux environments), sometimes eroding the very time and cost savings it initially promised. Ultimately, while offering short term benefits by adhering to existing manufacturing processes, design compromises can cascade into long-term challenges for manufacturers by compromising part performance, hindering scalability, and reducing potential market share.
Let’s now explore ways PECM can enable new design-to-manufacturing possibilities in key industries.
Expanding Design Agency with PECM
PECM’s unique material removal capabilities can be utilized to enhance current designs or enable the usage of entirely new geometries for a variety of key industries, bringing scalable, quality products to-market quicker.
Thin walls and sensitive features
PECM can produce delicate, high-aspect-ratio walls without imposing stress or thermal distortion: allowing design engineers to reclaim space within a part, achieve weight reduction, and reduce material usage and scrap.
For instance, PECM has allowed aerospace manufacturers to produce turbine blades/banes with thinner trailing edges, maximizing aerodynamic (and thereby fuel) efficiency for aircraft. These same capabilities have also allowed lightweighting via thinner walls in heat exchangers for similar industrial usages: improving thermal transfer efficiency and reclaiming space with denser, thinner heat exchanger channels.
Alternatively, PECM has also enabled medical device manufacturers to produce thinner wall anchors on cardiovascular devices that minimize the invasiveness of the devices while still retaining their strength and durability.
Multi-featured Arrays
PECM can utilize a multi-featured cathode capable of machining dozens or hundreds of features (such as microholes) in-parallel, avoiding the time and cost of machining them individually with conventional methods (such as CNC or laser-drilling).
In practice, PECM allows the machining of extreme high-aspect ratio (EHAR) microholes in turbine vanes, a capability aerospace and energy companies are constantly using to enhance cooling and improve overall engine functionality. These aspect ratios can sometimes reach 30:1 or even 150:1, and in many turbine applications, electrochemical machining is among the only processes capable of effectively machining these features.
PECM may also be utilized for denser, higher-quantity microhole arrays for fluid/gas distribution in semiconductor testing equipment or drug delivery devices in the medical industry, both of which are increasingly relying on ultra dense, uniform arrays of microholes to ensure precise and repeatable flow behavior. Whether it’s to evenly distribute test gases across testing wafers, or delivering micro-doses of critical medicine into patients, microhole features are both critical for these industries, and challenging to machine without a repeatable material removal process such as PECM.
Exotic Materials
PECM has the unique ability to machine a variety of tough, corrosion-resistant, brittle and exotic materials without concern for their hardness or heat resistance, due to the electrochemical nature of the process removing the workpiece material atom-by-atom.
PECM’s agnosticism to material hardness can enable manufacturers to utilize materials that can accomplish significantly better corrosion, heat, or fatigue resistance that may otherwise be challenging to conventionally manufacture without significant tool wear or geometrical limitations; PECM essentially unlocks entirely new parts that utilize the properties of exotic alloys.
Key aerospace manufacturers, for instance, are seeking increased utilization of single-crystal nickel-based superalloys to handle higher turbine inlet temperatures, but are continually struggling to create trailing-edge features or cooling channels without introducing residual stresses, microcracks, burrs, or HAZs due to the materials’ extreme hardness and temperature resistance: tough for even advanced material removal processes such as electrical discharge machining (EDM).
Alternatively, medtech leaders want to utilize the incredible shape-memory capabilities of Nitinol in more devices but are limited during machining by Nitinol's super-elasticity, work hardening and low thermal conductivity inhibiting efficient material removal, especially in smaller miniaturized features.
PECM’s material agnosticism enabled medtech companies to iterate new orthopedic device designs (such as bone fixtures and staples) while keeping nitinol as their primary material choice.
Internal, Hard-To-Reach & Selective In-Situ AM Finishing
PECM can utilize custom cathode designs and proprietary in-situ machining technology to remove material in hard-to-reach or internal features of parts, even machining selective regions at a time.
Certain additively-manufactured heat exchangers with sealed internal channels require PECM’s in-situ internal finishing capabilities to maximize surface area and thermal performance, as they can’t be cleanly disassembled after production. PECM allows burr-free, contactless internal finishing in select applications, allowing additive engineers to create new geometries in metal-AM without worry of disassembly. PECM can also be applied selectively to control surface finish across a part by using a custom cathode, smoothing critical regions while avoiding others. This enables engineers to design components where surface functionality can vary regionally on the part, at-scale.
For example, in orthopedic implants such as femoral stems, PECM can finish bearing or mating surfaces to precise smoothness while leaving osseointegrative regions untouched. This allows the implant to achieve both long-term stability through bone ingrowth and the required mechanical performance in load-bearing interfaces without secondary masking or manual finishing steps.
Conclusion
As industries push for higher performance, faster scaling, and greater material efficiency, the ability to marry design aspirations with efficient manufacturing processes is becoming essential. Too often, however, engineers are forced to compromise innovation to fit legacy processes, sacrificing performance, speed, cost advantages or even market share along the way.
By enabling thin walls, dense microhole arrays, machinability of exotic alloys, in-situ finishing, and selective surface finishing, PECM allows a “design-first” approach for engineers in critical industry. For manufacturers, this means shorter iteration cycles, lower long-term costs, and new pathways to market differentiation.
PECM can expand the design agency of your engineering teams while ensuring that bold ideas can be realized at industrial scale. Contact us to learn more.
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