Technology with a promising future
Additive manufacturing with metals
Metals are used in a wide range of industries due to their material properties such as strength, temperature resistance, durability, biocompatibility, chemical resistance and conductivity. The question arises as to what possibilities additive manufacturing with metals offers and to what extent the manufacturing industry can exploit them.
Traditional metalworking is a starting point for any engineering, manufacturing or design professional. From forming to casting to machining, metalworking is used in some way in almost every industry. Of course, there are a number of different benefits that come with such traditional processes. With investment casting, for example, engineers take advantage of the excellent surface finish and high dimensional stability associated with almost all types of metal. On the other hand, investment casting is extremely costly, does not make sense for small applications and requires a significant amount of labor. However, the list of conventional metal processing techniques and the associated benefits and risks is even longer. In many industries, companies are therefore looking for ways to replace traditional processes with advanced technologies in the hope of improving operations and reducing costs. One of these technologies in use is additive manufacturing.
In 2018, the global additive manufacturing industry was estimated to be worth over 9.3 billion US dollars, with growth expected to accelerate every year. In principle, additive manufacturing technology offers a number of particular advantages. Users enjoy unprecedented design freedom as traditional design boundaries become less important. Components that were previously almost impossible to manufacture can now be produced easily and cost-effectively using a 3D printer. Other benefits include weight reduction, shorter lead times and improved performance. This applies to additive manufacturing with metals as well as thermoplastic-based technologies. A number of expert analyses have shown that additive manufacturing with metals could open up a new era in manufacturing in certain application areas. One example of this is GE. The company has shown that in the production of a housing for a rocket fuel injector, additive manufacturing with metals was able to reduce the number of individual parts required from 150 components to just 2 components and shorten the lead time from 9 months to just 10 days.
Even a cursory glance at the growth and investment in additive manufacturing with metals illustrates the potential of this industry. In 2016, more than 1000 machines for additive manufacturing with metals were sold worldwide. Companies such as GE, UTC and Alcoa are investing heavily in this technology. 1.3 billion, 75 million and 60 million US dollars respectively. According to current forecasts, the industry will continue to grow at an annual rate of 47 percent and is expected to reach a market volume of 7 billion US dollars in 2026. The leading companies advocating such integration are from the industrial manufacturing, automotive and aerospace sectors. However, this potential means little to end users looking to incorporate it into their business until they recognize the pros and cons of the technology currently available on the market.
Advantages and limitations of additive manufacturing with metals
In general, four main techniques are used in the world of additive manufacturing with metals. The first technique, powder bed fusing (PBF), is most commonly used for metal additive manufacturing. It uses a laser or electron beam and offers complex shapes, precision and material reuse. Directed energy deposition (DEC or DMD) is the second most popular process. It is based on powdered or stranded material and offers the advantages of high productivity, large components and low material costs. In powder binding (PB), a binding agent is sprayed onto a metal powder bed to form a "green part". This results in low processing and operating costs, and a high throughput can be achieved at the same time. Finally, metal jetting (MJ) should be mentioned, in which the print heads emit droplets of metal nanoparticles. This process is used to produce high-quality components.
However, all additive manufacturing technologies with metals available on the market today also have some disadvantages that continue to stand in the way of their integration. Both the acquisition and production costs per part are extremely high for most, if not all, of the above technologies. Current technologies require a disproportionately high level of maintenance and the use of an inert environment (nitrogen-based). In addition, pre- and post-processing phases can be extremely complex.
During preparation, the user must deal with high-temperature processes that are required for laser sintering. Post-processing often requires disproportionately extensive machining operations to remove the anchoring and internal support structures. Today, post-processing can often take as much time as the printing itself. More than twice as much time is required to produce the final parts. There are also additional safety risks to consider. Metal powders often pose a risk of explosion - they can catch fire when swept out - while laser or electron beams pose additional safety risks.
The limitations and risks of the technology have so far made it impossible for the industry to switch to additive manufacturing with metals. The recently announced Layered Powder Metallurgy (LPM) could be the key to overcoming many of these problems. LPM has been developed in-house in recent years. This technology combines Stratasys ' jetting technology intellectual property with traditional powder metallurgy to offer aluminum powders, with additional alloys to be added in the future. The LPM solution consists of a three-stage additive manufacturing process. In this process, contours are printed using proprietary thermal printing material, powder is dispensed and distributed, and then the powder layers are compacted to achieve high density and controllable shrinkage.
The end result should be economical and easy to rework in terms of unit costs and throughput and offer high component quality. Internal testing by Stratasys and its OEM partners has shown that LPM can reduce unit costs by up to 80 percent compared to other metal additive manufacturing technologies available today. It also simplifies complex pre- and post-processing operations by reducing support structure removal from several hours to just a few minutes and printing to the finished part ten times faster than existing metal additive manufacturing solutions. These benefits have already been realized by the early adopting OEM partners at the forefront of their respective industries. This involved functional prototyping and small series production applications for the aerospace and automotive industries, as well as potential use in the defense industry.
The metal additive manufacturing market has finally reached the point of being used in actual manufacturing. Now that the technical hurdles are gradually being removed, manufacturers can begin to use this technology as a truly promising and competitive alternative to traditional metal processing.
Andreas Langfeld, President EMEA Stratasys / am
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