metal additive manufacturing offers the
possibility to produce complex parts without the design constraints of
traditional manufacturing routes. components that would not have even been
possible just a few years ago can now be made to high standards using a wide
range of metal powders. no longer solely a prototyping technology, additive
manufacturing is now being used for the production of series components for the
most demanding applications. additive manufacturing, also referred to as 3d
printing, is a technology that produces three-dimensional parts layer by layer
from a material, be it polymer or metal based. the method relies on a digital
data file being transmitted to a machine that then builds the component. the
following introduction to additive manufacturing outlines a number of the key
technologies used to process metal parts and provides a look at the current
state of the industry.
metal
additive manufacturing offers unrivalled design freedom with the ability to
manufacture parts from a wide range of materials. this is a prototype of an
optimised bracket for an airbus a380 made from stainless steel powder, with
conventional bracket behind (courtesy eads)
background to additive manufacturing
additive manufacturing offers many advantages in the production of parts, presenting unrivalled design freedom with the ability to manufacture single or multiple components from a wide range of materials.
the method is considered as an additive process rather than a subtractive process that removes layers of material, such as milling. other terms often used to describe the general process include 3d printing, additive fabrication, freeform fabrication, fabbing and additive layer manufacture.
the early am processes were established in the mid 1980s as a solution for faster product development. at this time the practices were called rapid prototyping, because the idea was really to produce three dimensional models or mock-ups in order to check form, fit and function.
in 1987 3d systems began the commercialisation of the plastic processing technique known as stereolithography (sl), offering completely new possibilities to designers and engineers and supporting the fast growing market of “short life” products. the process essentially solidifies thin layers of uv light sensitive liquid polymer using a laser and was the first commercially available am system in the world.
in the early 1990s other polymer based am technologies began commercialisation, including fused deposition (fdm) from stratasys, solid ground curing (sgc) from cubital and laminated object manufacturing (lom) from helisys. selective laser sintering (sls) from dtm was also introduced at this time, a process that fuses powder materials using a laser.
the latest metal am machine from eos was introduced in 2013. the eosint m400 uses a 1 kw laser (courtesy eos)
metal based am
processes were developed in the 1990s and introduced to the market soon after.
at this time several companies launched systems for laser sintering approaches
which were able to produce metal parts directly, providing an alternative to
direct multi stage processes.
in 1994 eos demonstrated their prototype
eosint m160 machine based on direct metal laser sintering technology. in 1995
the company’s eosint m250 was launched, enabling the rapid production of metal
tools. these systems where able to manufacture metal parts by sintering the powder,
but in many cases the mechanical characteristics of the materials were more
comparable to composites than to metal alloys, due to the combination of a low
melting material (e.g. a bronze-based matrix) with a high resistant material
(e.g. stainless or tool steel).
in 1998 optomec commercialised its
laser-engineered net shaping (lens) metal powder system based on technology
developed at sandia national labs,
usa. in 1999 röders, a german
company, began marketing its controlled metal buildup (cmb) machine based on
technology developed at the fraunhofer
institute for production technology in germany. also in 1999, extrudehone introduced its prometal
rapid tooling system rts-300, the commercial realisation of mit’s process for
manufacturing metal parts and tooling. similar to the use of polymers and waxes
in the preparation of feedstock for the metal injection moulding (mim) process,
this system was able to print a binder on a powder bed, binding the metal
particles and producing “green parts” which subsequently have to be debound,
sintered and infiltrated to get completely dense material.
in 2002 precision optical manufacturing began
sales of its direct metal deposition (dmd) laser-cladding systems, a process
that produces and repairs parts using metal powder.