Several weeks ago there was an active thread on fabricating plastic parts using laser sintering or polymerization. The following just popped up in my email indicating that this has progressed to using electron beam sintering on materials such as titanium, and the chrome-cobalt super alloys.
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By Leslie Gordon, Senior Editor
How often has one of your designs been a trade-off of weight versus strength? Too heavy, and you waste material. Too light, and parts might fail.
Hold on to your hat. A new technology fabricates components that are strong and lightweight. Called electron beam melting (EBM), the technique shoots electrons moving at half the speed of light onto powdered metal to melt and weld the material, one layer at a time. As with any other additive method, EBM builds parts that can fill arbitrary volumes. It suits jobs demanding costly materials where machining would leave expensive chips lying on the floor. EBM is also a great way to generate so-called ?lattice structures? or arrangements of repeating patterns with engineered stiffnesses. There is often no other practical way to fabricate some of these geometries.
Lattices are of interest to aerospace because they provide lightweight yet strong components. And in the medical area, lattices can replace material in implants. The resulting structures cost less as well as help facilitate bone ingrowth. In general, lattice structures can reduce weight, transfer heat, absorb impact, dampen vibration, and be engineered to a specific stiffness.
Electron-beam machines (e-machines) have a build envelope around
200 200 180 mm and a build platform usually made from stainless steel. Since the melted parts have a different thermal expansion than stainless steel, they just pop off with no need for cutting or sawing. Titanium and cobalt-chromium alloy work well with EBM and there is a continuously growing list of other materials that work as well. Arcam AB in Molndal, Sweden, which invented the technology, says its versions of the alloys show no remaining layering effects or weld lines from the build process and that material microstructures still feature a normal grain structure.?Lattice structures are actually any porous geometry or what we call nonstochastic foam,? says Denis R. Cormier, associate professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering at North Carolina State (NC State) Univ. in Raleigh, N.C. ?In 2003, NC State became the first institution in the U.S. to purchase an e-beam machine."
Anybody seen one of these run? And why was this developed by the Swedes and not one of the American labs?
Unka' George [George McDuffee]
------------------------------------------- He that will not apply new remedies, must expect new evils: for Time is the greatest innovator: and if Time, of course, alter things to the worse, and wisdom and counsel shall not alter them to the better, what shall be the end?
Francis Bacon (1561-1626), English philosopher, essayist, statesman. Essays, "Of Innovations" (1597-1625).