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ESA 'Amaze' Project Aims To Take 3D Printing 'Into the Metal Age'
dryriver sends this BBC report:
"The European Space Agency has unveiled plans to 'take 3D printing into the metal age' by building parts for jets, spacecraft and fusion projects. The Amaze project brings together 28 institutions to develop new metal components which are lighter, stronger and cheaper than conventional parts. Additive manufacturing (or '3D printing') has already revolutionized the design of plastic products. Printing metal parts for rockets and planes would cut waste and save money. The layered method of assembly also allows intricate designs — geometries which are impossible to achieve with conventional metal casting. Parts for cars and satellites can be optimized to be lighter and — simultaneously — incredibly robust. Tungsten alloy components that can withstand temperatures of 3,000C were unveiled at Amaze's launch on Tuesday at London Science Museum. At such extreme temperatures they can survive inside nuclear fusion reactors and on the nozzles of rockets. 'We want to build the best quality metal products ever made. Objects you can't possibly manufacture any other way,' said David Jarvis, ESA's head of new materials and energy research."
And now, someone will come along saying computers got better, therefore everything else will get better at the same rate even though there's no common thread.
Amaze is a loose acronym for Additive Manufacturing Aiming Towards Zero Waste and Efficient Production of High-Tech Metal Products
I got AMATZWAEPOHTMP ... not even close. Sounds like someone just really wanted to spell a word from all that
Laser sintering is an awesome field but it has been around awhile.
Here's a "How it's Made" about the process from almost 3 years ago.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6Px6RSL9Ac
Um....people have already been doing this for some time now. News that would be interesting to me would be to make 3d metal printing semi-affordable for the common hacker since most of these machines cost around $1,000,000. Right now 3d printing molds for metal casting is the only practical solution.
Does this mean 3d printed guns will be viable now? This is actually really scary...
There seems to be a contradiction between this illustration and the following quote, both which appeared in the article;
"One common problem is porosity - small air bubbles in the product. Rough surface finishing is an issue too," he said.
It would seem that a rough porous ball bearing would not be that effective.
You know, if you want to just automatically churn out metal gun parts, you could do it with a CNC mill for a fraction of the cost. It's not like automated metalworking is a new thing. The plastic gun was mostly a stunt -- a dangerous one at that.
Or if you were willing to put in the time and elbow grease yourself, you could mill your own parts by hand for a fraction of that with power tools bought from Home Depot. It's not like there isn't a wealth of material at your fingertips on the internet from a devoted community of paranoid "gotta be able to make this myself once the gubbermint takes mah gun away" people to get you started. As a bonus, many of these people are smart and meticulous (despite my teasing), and it's all legal with the right licenses, so the material's more trustworthy than your average Anarchists's Cookbook nonsense.
And if you really don't care about having a polished, reusable model to show off, zip guns can be made with entirely off the shelf parts found in your local tool store too.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I've been waiting for car vending machines for a year now.
Parts destined for aerospace are subject to rigorous testing and the first dozen or more prototype parts usually are sacrificed for testing. Exact dimensions, strength, creep and fatigue resistance must all be determined and the statistical lower bounds must be established before any part can be certified as airworthy. For wrought alloys this stuff is old hat. Things like welding are more of a problem and fabricated parts have fallen out of favor due to the rigorous QA needed. Look also at the use of as-HIP powder parts for turbine disks, etc. (They aren't.) Additive manufactured parts will have to be tested and qualified. I think those issues have been underestimated so far.
Most readers looked at the headline and thought "Cool, 3D printed Metallica logos!"
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
Whenever they talk about strength they talk about using strong materials like tungsten. But most strong parts in the real world are made by forging weak (and cheap) materials like iron, to fix the crystal structure for the desired properties. I don't see how 3D printing will address this. If strength is only available via strong materials then applications will be severely limited.
I don't know, 3d printing obviously shows a lot of promise, but I find it hard to countenance it's even in the Stone Age as of yet ..
leeson and
Right. That's all we need.
Hmm... isn't this already being employed by SpaceX? Just look at the 3D design video and at the 3 minute mark Elon describes how they send the design straight to laser-metal printer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNqs_S-zEBY
So ... what else is new?
Reheated coffee is suitable only when there are no more fresh beans available.
geometries which are impossible to achieve
Now they just need to work out the Transformations that were too hard to find.
Just beware of poisons in your bloodstream.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
holy copyright infringement Batman!
There's people out there that'd do that just to piss off Lars.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
... but I don't know when numerical control was first done for it? My father worked on a system to put metal on the bottom of ceramic cookware to improve heat conductivity at METCO in the 1980s, although even then that was done by hand for tests. Flame spray was commonly used then to build up worn metal shafts for repairs. From:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_spraying
"In classical (developed between 1910 and 1920) but still widely used processes such as flame spraying and wire arc spraying, the particle velocities are generally low ( [less than] 150 m/s), and raw materials must be molten to be deposited. Plasma spraying, developed in the 1970s, uses a high-temperature plasma jet generated by arc discharge with typical temperatures >15000 K, which makes it possible to spray refractory materials such as oxides, molybdenum, etc."
Thanks for everything, Dad!
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.