3D Printing Doubles the Strength of Stainless Steel (sciencemag.org)

sciencehabit writes: Researchers have come up with a way to 3D print tough and flexible stainless steel, an advance that could lead to faster and cheaper ways to make everything from rocket engines to parts for nuclear reactors and oil rigs. The team designed a computer-controlled process to not only create dense stainless steel layers, but to more tightly control the structure of their material from the nanoscale to micron scale. That allows the printer to build in tiny cell wall-like structures on each scale that prevent fractures and other common problems. Tests showed that under certain conditions the final 3D printed stainless steels were up to three times stronger than steels made by conventional techniques and yet still ductile.
The work was done using a commercially-available 3D printer, according to Science magazine. "That makes it likely that other groups will be able to quickly follow their lead to make a wide array of high-strength stainless steel parts for everything from fuel tanks in airplanes to pressure tubes in nuclear power plants."

Comments

Re: Metal and Plastic

[oic0]

Patents killed is mostly. It cost to much to do anything with the stuff because the patent holders were harsh. Isnt that great? if you think of something first, you can hold the whole human race back if you're a jerk.

Re: Metal and Plastic

[Anonymous Coward]

Even at a thousand times the cost of other methods, that would still be quite useful. Multiple projects I've worked on had a component that was struggling with multiple constraints, and spending a lot of money to make that part work saves money for the whole project. For example, we had a project where one part could be made using tradional methods, but would be larger due to give access to machine some required features and to have enough room to assemble with fasteners or welding. Making that part bigger meant other parts got larger, limiting what shops could make it, making transportation more difficult, etc, and would have ballooned the cost of the whole machine from $10M to $50M. Spending $500k to have the critical part 3d printed instead of $10k to be traditionally machined (not counting extra engineering required to make sure assembly worked) was a hell of a lot cheaper since the part was smaller. Even if we had to pay x1000 times as much, $10M for the part, it would have been cheaper than the extra $40M needed to make the rest of the machine accommodate a larger, more traditional part.

Re: Metal and Plastic

[MightyYar]

you can hold the whole human race back

Yeah, but not for long. And you set off a furious race to find workarounds, which itself often advances the state of the art.

There are exceptions... my hometown has a historically protected bridge. The reason it is historically protected is that it is a unique draw bridge design and I don't think there are any other surviving examples. The reason there are no other surviving examples is it is needlessly complex and thus prone to breakdown and relatively expensive to maintain. The reason it is needlessly complex is it had to work around a draw-bridge (Strauss and Scherzer bascule) patent and so used a Rall bascule design. This design was abandoned after the patent ran out. Because it sucked. Pretty soon the bridge will be 90 years old, and they are stuck with 90 years of extra maintenance and downtime because of the patent situation in 1930.