3dprinting 3D Metals Printing Breakthrough - 100x Faster, 10x Cheaper, and it's about to hit the market

[Blue-Vision]

100x faster, 10x cheaper: 3D metal printing is about to go mainstream

Article link | New Atlas.com Website

 

Now this is cool, and badly needed. Problem is it's only good to 50 mics ... not entirely suitable for Aerospace or anything else that needs tolerances to be within 10 or 15 microns (engine components like turbopumps, camshafts for car engines, etc), but for other items that don't need tolerances to be so fine this will be a huge boon to them. Read on!

Quote

Sintering Multiple Parts – Desktop Metal’s Studio System includes a fully-automated, office-friendly sintering furnace with fast cycle times and a peak temperature of 1400°C, allowing for the sintering of a wide variety of materials. (Credit: Desktop Metal)

 

Desktop Metal – remember the name. This Massachussetts company is preparing to turn manufacturing on its head, with a 3D metal printing system that's so much faster, safer and cheaper than existing systems that it's going to compete with traditional mass manufacturing processes. Plenty of design studios and even home users run desktop printers, but the only affordable printing materials are cheap ABS plastics. And at the other end of the market, while organizations like NASA and Boeing are getting valuable use out of laser-melted metal printing, it's a very slow and expensive process that doesn't seem to scale well. But a very exciting company out of Massachusetts, headed by some of the guys who came up with the idea of additive manufacture in the first place, believes it's got the technology and the machinery to boost 3D printing into the big time, for real.

 

The hype is real. And if Desktop Metal delivers on its promises – that it can make reliable metal printing up to 100 times faster, with 10 times cheaper initial costs and 20 times cheaper materials costs than existing laser technologies, using a much wider range of alloys – these machines might be the tipping point for large scale 3D manufacturing.

 

Coming in at some 10 times cheaper than equivalent laser systems, Desktop Metal's Studio machines are also a ton more practical to have in an office. Without hazardous (and sometimes explosive) metal powders to deal with, or dangerous lasers, you can stick them pretty much anywhere without needing to install ventilation or make your workers wear respirators.

Indeed, having the Studio system around is much more like a regular old FDM (fused deposition modeling) ABS plastic printer than any other metal printing machine. It's very low maintenance and requires no special support equipment or staff.

 

The metals arrive in rod form, bound to a polymer binding agent and shipped in cartridges. But there's a ton of metal options – basically anything you can use in a Metal Injection Molding (MIM) system. That includes 4140 chromoly steel, aluminum, copper, bronze, a range of stainless steels, Hiperco 50 magnetic, titanium, and more than 200 other alloys.

(Read the rest of the article at the link above.)

Nifty ... hope they can get a bunch of them sold, then start working on revision 2 that improves the process as well as the accuracy (say, 10 microns instead of 50).

[DocM]

Wonder if it can print receivers? Hmmm...