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

[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.