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Next gen 3D metal printing

fabric8labs.com

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Re: Next gen 3D metal printing

#101

Post by phkahler »

dpain wrote: post #55

CTO of Fabric8 here - happy to answer any questions you may have about the technology or company. As you can tell we've got a process that's quite different than other metal AM techniques with some very unique benefits that we're excited to share!

Has there been any work on photoelectric plating? You could then use DPL to project a pattern for an entire layer at once. I'm not sure how one could ensure uniform thickness. Just wondering if the basics of such an approach have been developed or if its even possible.

Re: Next gen 3D metal printing

#102

Post by tbenst »

ju-st wrote: post #97
FrostKiwi wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are solved issues. > oxidation at high temperatures SLM machines typically use an Argon gas chamber. DED machines use an Argon gas shield. > It’s more typical to print copper alloys than pure copper. In the context of modern SLM, it depends on your definition of "pure" and "alloy". During the process, a bit of resin to is mixed into the powder and heat treated in a final step to get to 99.9% pure copper. edit:…

Printing pure copper (99.9%) is possible since years with SLM process using lasers with an appropriate wavelength

Any references for 99.9% density with SLM copper? My understanding is that pure copper SLM printing is less frequently done as doesn’t work well with the infrared lasers on most machines, requires high heat & speed, and has more porosity than other alloys. It’s also hard to print so that it’s strong, conductive and heat stable.

I think there’s still quite active research in the area, though, and no doubt there’s a lot going on that I don’t know! https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S026412752...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10861549/

Re: Next gen 3D metal printing

#103

Post by cjbgkagh »

Tossrock wrote: post #77
cjbgkagh wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s really cool and I wish I had one of these machines. On the assumption that I couldn’t afford such a machine myself for DIY, it would be really cool to have a send-cut-send like service. It seems like the relatively gentle process and I assume predictable results with minimal post processing would lend itself to an high degree of automation. Perhaps a scale out manufacturing set up where the speed of an individua…

You can get on-demand metal printing from Shapeways. Somewhat expensive compared to sendcutsend, but still far below aerospace.

Sure, there is a huge gamut of prices from aerospace to just above material costs. On the expensive side I would use it judiciously, on the economical side I would use it for just about everything and so would many others. I do a bit of DIY and a large amount of the design work is to work around limitations of cheaper materials and cheaper processes. Most of what I make is onesie-twosie where the design costs dominate so I can afford to spend more on a more expensive materials and processes to cut back on the design. But it would be extra amazing if there was an economical high quality process that is suitable for prototyping and would also be amenable to cost competitive mass manufacturing. That would be absolutely world changing. If I could just list designs somewhere and customers have them printed on demand, either via Amazon or some drop-ship, I could recoup a lot of the design costs so I could spend more time designing things - maybe even make a career out of it. Instead of needing a whole factory to support the low cost manufacturing of a single part it could just be a design document sitting on a server somewhere.

I understand that it is not in Fabric8s interest to do this though, expensive machines are high margin and exclusivity is required to maintain a bit of a monopoly for their customers so that their customers can justify purchasing the expensive machines in the first place. If Fabric8 were to start out with expensive machines and then subsequently release cheaper machines they would burn their previous customers. That would make this one of the many cool things that I can't use until the patents expire which would be a damn shame and would also make the technology completely uninteresting to me as I would have to focus on alternatives in the interim. It took a long time to go from Rep-Rap to Bambu Labs for FDM but with increased interest in the space that process is speeding up. Hopefully Micronics will manage a consumer Nylon SLS printer. A ton of small scale manufacturing technology is being made cheaply enough for home use and services like PCBWay and Send-Cut-Send have really democratized high quality manufacturing. I can make many things production quality with near zero overheads and I can buy things from others who have done the same at similarly low costs.

Something like send-cut-send for ECAM seems inevitable and it would be up to Fabric8 to decide if they want to cannibalize themselves instead of having someone else undercut them. I don't know how defendable their patents are, there does seem to be a fair amount of prior art. There is probably a bunch of trade secrets though. For them one of the downsides of having such a promising solution is that there is an even greater incentive for competitors to enter the market. I would posit that long term there is more money to be made with a scale-out low margin mass market solution where they could better leverage trade secrets gleaned from process experience than than selling individual high margin machines. If they kept overheads low enough it would never be in anyone else's interest to enter the market and they could leverage their trade secrets for above average returns ad infinitum.

Re: Next gen 3D metal printing

#104

Post by tastyfreeze »

Nathanael_M wrote: post #59
dpain wrote: post #55

CTO of Fabric8 here - happy to answer any questions you may have about the technology or company. As you can tell we've got a process that's quite different than other metal AM techniques with some very unique benefits that we're excited to share!

Where does this fall on the hazardous/toxicity scale? What kind of off-gassing/risks are there, especially compared to existing high resolution powder based systems? Disclaimer: I don’t know much about this field, this may be a dumb question.

Metallic ionic solutions are usually strong acids. They are made by dissolving metal in sulfuric or nitric acids. Looks like they are using copper sulfate as the electrolyte. After the copper is deposited you are left with sulfuric acid.

Re: Next gen 3D metal printing

#106

Post by [deleted] »

naasking wrote: post #99

I was interested in electrochemical 3D printing awhile back: 1. Deposition can be very precise (they say micron-level resolution here), but it's typically slow for a naive approach. That's not necessarily a problem if you need that precision. They say their approach is fast, probably by using some kind of array of nozzles (think an inkjet printer head). 2. You can also selectively run the process in reverse, so an el…

[deleted]

Re: Next gen 3D metal printing

#107

Post by throwup238 »

naasking wrote: post #99

I was interested in electrochemical 3D printing awhile back: 1. Deposition can be very precise (they say micron-level resolution here), but it's typically slow for a naive approach. That's not necessarily a problem if you need that precision. They say their approach is fast, probably by using some kind of array of nozzles (think an inkjet printer head). 2. You can also selectively run the process in reverse, so an el…

> by using some kind of array of nozzles (think an inkjet printer head).

By bet is on electrospray ionization nozzles. It's a well understood technique thanks to mass spectrometers, it's just a matter of time before someone miniaturizes them and creates a way to control the spray pattern.

Re: Next gen 3D metal printing

#108

Post by darksaints »

dpain wrote: post #55

CTO of Fabric8 here - happy to answer any questions you may have about the technology or company. As you can tell we've got a process that's quite different than other metal AM techniques with some very unique benefits that we're excited to share!

A couple of questions:

1) can you print on oxide, nitride, or carbide ceramics?

2) can you print on shaped materials? Like for example, printing a pcb directly onto the inner side of a rigid shell for an aerofoil/wing?

3) what sort of material restrictions come with electrochemical printing? Can you do aluminum? Titanium?

4) what is the minimum feature size? Could this, for example, print a controlled porous/wick structure with pore sizes around 50um?

5) for those of us without the capital to buy a printer, will you also offer printing services?

Re: Next gen 3D metal printing

#109

Post by Tossrock »

cjbgkagh wrote: post #103
Tossrock wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can get on-demand metal printing from Shapeways. Somewhat expensive compared to sendcutsend, but still far below aerospace.

Sure, there is a huge gamut of prices from aerospace to just above material costs. On the expensive side I would use it judiciously, on the economical side I would use it for just about everything and so would many others. I do a bit of DIY and a large amount of the design work is to work around limitations of cheaper materials and cheaper processes. Most of what I make is onesie-twosie where the design costs dominat…

> If I could just list designs somewhere and customers have them printed on demand, either via Amazon or some drop-ship, I could recoup a lot of the design costs so I could spend more time designing things - maybe even make a career out of it.

This is literally what Shapeways does: https://www.shapeways.com/marketplace

Re: Next gen 3D metal printing

#110

Post by kbenson »

metal_am wrote: post #6
kbenson wrote: post #4

My understanding is that most current metal 3d printing yields items with significantly worse properties with respect to shear forces, because of how the molecules align compared to when it's melted together as a whole and cooled (or something like that, I can't find the research paper someone linked to me in the past here regarding that). Do we know if this is better with respect to that?

Texture (the statistical arrangement of all the crystal lattice arrangements that make up a metal) can play a role on mechanical properties, but current metal AM is more than able to meet material standards. It's good to be careful with blanket statements because the most accurate answer is usually "it depends."

I'm not sure I made a blanket statement, except with respect to my understanding, and I can assure you that I was factually correct in my assessment of my own understanding. ;)

I was careful to phrase my comment in a way that I thought could lead to useful discussion, because I value that, and to note it was only my understanding, because my understanding is outdated and minimal. It just so happens that I was part of a prior discussion years ago regarding suitability of 3d printed metal parts, and found some information at that time which pointed to some of the problems they have in comparison to other methods, so was interesting in learning more.

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