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."

Comments

Lasers + 3D printing = Nerdgasm

[MatthiasF]

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

You mean DMLS?

[Dishwasha]

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.

Re:You mean DMLS?

[kaiser423]

Already can do. Look at Cold Spray - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_dynamic_cold_spray

We have/had a Cold Spray machine here at work. Not a lot of business for it, so it's not active right now. You could just mix in various titaniums, steels, aluminum and make all types of fun semi-alloys. You could even mix plastic or other materials in there to get some really interesting and crazy materials, but none of them really exhibited true alloy-like characteristics. The most practical thing I saw it do was a local machine shop botched the job on the final pass of this hugely expensive large precision titanium piece that would require them to junk it and start over. We cold-sprayed the gouge back in and then they re-machined it correctly, saving tons of time, money and effort.

Problem is that alloys or unique materials nearly always get their unique properties due to the unique circumstances with which they were formed. There's always interesting steps to ensure that the bonds are as expected, like extreme pressure or heat, being under various gas blankets or fluids when combining, etc.

This is just melty where Cold Spray was deformative.

I mean this is cool. You can make some really neat things, but exotic alloys or new materials is definitely not one of them.Yea, you could stack materials or "thread" them together, but we're already pretty good at that using massive presses.

Re:You mean DMLS?

[LiavK]

From the wikipedia article: "Gas dynamic cold spray (GDCS) is a coating deposition method developed in the mid-1980s in the Soviet Union." Nice. I've never heard of this technology. For a while I was working for a small startup doing some mechanical design and was doing research into exotic fabrication technologies. I came across some truly great technologies -- hydroforming, which uses hydrolic pressure to form metal into deep draw forms and Explosive Forming which, yes, involves using explosive to shape metals were two of my favourites.

Re:Scary Implication...

[Verdatum]

Yes. For the low investment cost of, say, $250,000, you can own a machine that laser-sinters metal into something that will allow you to make most parts of a gun with the possible exception of the springs. Or, you could ya know, buy a gun on the black market for a couple hundred.

Re:Oh yes yes

[peragrin]

And yet everyday we are using alloys, materials, and medicines that 40 years ago were all but a dream.

Hybrid synthetic fibers, hell the metal alloy's used in your cell phone, and laptop didn't have mass production status 40 years ago. 40 years ago building things at sub 100nm processing was considered all but impossible.

The real trick isn't when it is first possible to do something or even when it is available to a select few, but when any idiot can do it. The microwave oven took 15 years to go from proof of concept to an affordable counter appliance. and another 10 years for decent ideas on how to use it practically.

Metal 3D printing is a good 20+ years from everyday use. but it starts today.

Contradiction

[jklovanc]

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.

Nothing new there.

[Valdrax]

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.

Re:Oh yes yes

[wagnerrp]

Metal 3D printing is a good 20+ years from everyday use. but it starts today.

Technically, it started like 30 years ago, and we've been using manual additive welding for much longer than that, but who's counting...

Testing and Quality

[steelscalp]

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.