Composites equipment maker Addcomposites has put four video courses online at no cost, and one of them is aimed squarely at the largest end of extrusion-based 3D printing. The Addcomposites Learn course page lists Composites Design, Automated Fiber Placement, Filament Winding and Large Format Additive Manufacturing, and states plainly that no account is needed to watch. According to VoxelMatters, the courses went live on October 12 and together contain 179 short lessons.
For FilamentFeed readers, the interesting one is the LFAM course: 50 lessons across nine chapters, running 1 hour 40 minutes in total, on printing metre-scale parts and tools from pellets. That is a different world from a desktop machine pushing 1.75 mm filament, but many of the underlying problems are the same ones makers wrestle with every day, only scaled up until they become impossible to ignore.
What is in the suite
The company's course listing gives the following breakdown:
- Composites Design: 41 lessons, 8 chapters, 1 h 26 min
- Automated Fiber Placement: 46 lessons, 8 chapters, 3 h 5 min
- Filament Winding: 42 lessons, 8 chapters, 1 h 39 min
- Large Format Additive Manufacturing: 50 lessons, 9 chapters, 1 h 40 min
Added up, that is just under eight hours of material. The lessons are short by design, and the format is the notable part. Addcomposites says every lesson runs a live simulation and asks the learner to predict the outcome before seeing it. That predict-then-observe structure is a well-worn teaching technique, and it suits manufacturing topics where intuition is often wrong: how a laminate responds to a change in ply orientation, or, in the LFAM course, how layer time affects bonding between layers.
According to VoxelMatters, the Composites Design course exercises take place in AddPly, a browser-based laminate design app from Addcomposites. The AFP course draws on the book Automated Fiber Placement: Status, Challenges, and Evolution by Ramy Harik and Alex Brasington, used with permission, according to the course page.
Inside the LFAM course
The course page describes the LFAM material as covering how to print metre-scale parts and tools from pellets, organised around five themes: extruder and bead, layer time and the weld, fibre and warp, machines and machining, and printed tooling. Addcomposites says it was built from open research literature.
Each of those themes maps onto something a filament-printer owner will recognise. "Extruder and bead" is the large-format version of extrusion width and flow tuning, except that the material starts as pellets rather than a spool. "Fibre and warp" covers the distortion that fibre-filled materials are meant to tame, the same reason people reach for carbon-fibre-filled nylon on a desktop machine. "Machines and machining" pairs the printer with the subtractive step, a sign that the course treats machining printed parts as part of the workflow. "Printed tooling" points at one of the main jobs these machines are asked to do: making the tools that other parts are produced on.
The theme that deserves the most attention is "layer time and the weld." VoxelMatters notes that the trade-off between layer time and interlayer bonding is a key quality driver in LFAM. The physics will be familiar to anyone who has printed a tall, thin part and watched layer adhesion suffer, or printed a tiny one and watched it slump because each layer never cooled. At large scale, a single layer can take long enough that the bead below cools before the next one is laid on it, while printing too fast leaves the stack too soft. That is general printing experience rather than a claim from the course page, but it shows why the relationship between layer time and bonding matters.
The course is not vendor-neutral in origin. VoxelMatters reports it is closely tied to Addcomposites' product portfolio, including the ADDX system, which combines large-format polymer extrusion with selective continuous-fibre reinforcement on a single robotic platform. The company also makes the AFP-XS and AFP-X fibre placement systems and AddPath toolpath software. The course page, for its part, says the LFAM curriculum was built by the company's engineers from open research literature.
Access, tests and certificates
Watching costs nothing and requires no sign-up. VoxelMatters says free registration is needed to save progress and to earn a certificate. Each chapter ends with a five-question test, and participants who pass every chapter of a course receive a certificate with a serial number that can be independently verified and added to a LinkedIn profile. VoxelMatters cautions that the certificate is issued by a machinery manufacturer rather than an academic institution: it confirms course completion, while the depth of the training is for the learner to judge.
The other three courses are less directly relevant to 3D printing but not irrelevant. Composites Design covers the laminate thinking that sits behind any fibre-reinforced part, and Filament Winding and Automated Fiber Placement cover established automated composite processes, with AFP lessons spanning the machine, defects, path planning, inspection, cure and certification.
What It Means for Makers
Most hobbyists will never stand next to a pellet extruder on a robot arm, and this course will not change that. What it offers is a structured explanation of why big prints fail and how industry works around it, delivered in short lessons that force you to commit to a prediction before the simulation shows the answer. The layer-time and warp material in particular translates downward: the same relationships between cooling, bonding and shrinkage plausibly apply on a 250 mm print bed, though that is this article's inference rather than a claim from the course.
For makers already building large-format machines, or experimenting with pellet extruders on converted CNC frames, the LFAM course is a free way to fill gaps with material the company says is drawn from open research literature. For students and career-changers, the free certificate confirms completion. The obvious caveat is that the courses come from a company with hardware to sell, and VoxelMatters notes the course is closely tied to its product portfolio. Watch it with that in mind, and it is still an unusually generous piece of free technical education.
The full catalogue is available at the Addcomposites Learn course page.
