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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!
Your website mentions printing on pcbs, do you expect this to be a competitive option for pcb prototyping or manufacture?
I saw a video doing something like awhile ago [1], and I thought the idea of using electroplating made sense, but I know absolutely nothing about chemical engineering or material science. It's interesting to see this idea in action, though with my limited experience with electroplating it seems like it'd be absurdly slow. [1] https://youtu.be/W1d36wbx_yg
I saw a video doing something like awhile ago [1], and I thought the idea of using electroplating made sense, but I know absolutely nothing about chemical engineering or material science. It's interesting to see this idea in action, though with my limited experience with electroplating it seems like it'd be absurdly slow. [1] https://youtu.be/W1d36wbx_yg
You're right - electroplating isn't traditionally very fast. Much of the system has been engineered to drive a build speed that's relevant for mass manufacturing while maintaining material properties (think 100-1000x faster than typical electroplating)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I managed 1μm/minute when electroplating PCBs at home. Faster and it grows a sponge of copper (entrapped gas I assume). I would like to know how they did it.
Seems like even in a vacuum it could still make a metal foam, but perhaps would help minimize defects?
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?
The ECAM process operates at room temperature and deposits material via electrodeposition - so no melting is involved! The resulting microstructure is a fine grained structure (avg. grain size ~ 500 - 1000 nm) with fairly equiaxed grains that provide high strength and isotropic behavior. So we don't see the same challenge that say a laser based process encounters due to melting and cooling.
-Fabric8Labs
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're right - electroplating isn't traditionally very fast. Much of the system has been engineered to drive a build speed that's relevant for mass manufacturing while maintaining material properties (think 100-1000x faster than typical electroplating)
Very, very cool. If you can make metal 3D printing viable for consumers I'll be the first in line to buy one (though I realize that's probably quite a ways away).
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!
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…
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!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-UbDk7LrvU
Best regards, =3
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!
How did your team handle the clogging problem with these designs? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-UbDk7LrvU Best regards, =3
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!
1.) How you compensate for anode consumption/geometry changes over the lifetime of the anode. For instance, does the center get worn away or do you try to uniformly use each "pixel".
2.) More details on anode "pixel" geometry and minimum feature size.
3.) Can you talk about the development process? Did you have in situ measurement, or post build analysis of the part and anode.
4.) Typical surface finish?