ELECTRON BEAM TIME TO SHINE WORDS: DANIEL O'CONNOR
W
ayland was a master smith of Germanic folklore; such was the fame of his prowess at forging that one of the greatest warriors in literature, Beowulf, had Wayland make his breastplate. Wayland was said to be able to manufacture an arsenal that no other man could. As far as additive manufacturing company naming conventions go, it is a pretty strong start.
Wayland Additive is a new British company with a technology that recently secured £3m in funding from Longwall Ventures after a period of Innovate UK plus industry R&D development funding. Fundamentally, it is a metal electron beam powder bed fusion technology, but its backstory is a classic case of the mother of the invention being necessity. Ian Laidler, CTO at Wayland Additive, was tasked by bosses at Reliance Precision - a one-hundred-year-old engineering firm - to investigate metal 3D printing technology. The then Technical Director examined the current technologies on offer with the eye of somebody who has spent three decades mastering semiconductor manufacturing. For Ian, the current metal additive manufacturing technologies didn't have the repeatability or reliability he’d come to expect.
"I have a background in electron-beam lithography from the semiconductor industry and realised that there were things in current electron-beam additive manufacturing that could be improved," explained Ian during a meeting at Formnext 2019. "I recruited my old team from the lithography world and first set upon resolving the Achilles heel of current electron beam AM - charging of the powder."
The charging of the powder is the reason for what is known as a smoke event or 'smoking'; which can ruin both builds and require machine cleandown. To minimise smoking, current systems pre-sinter the surface layer with rapid scanning of the beam before the actual melting. This presintering workaround means de-powdering is difficult (parts with complex internal channels are virtually impossible to process with electron beam), processing options, materials and recyclability are restricted. It is the opinion of the Wayland Additive team, including Director of Business Development, Peter Hansford - a man with decades of AM experience - that the charging of the powder has been electron beam manufacturing's rate-limiting step. According to Peter, from a metallurgy perspective, the electron beam is the superior
SHOWN: NEUBEAM IN ACTION
SHOWN: METALLURGY OF PART UNDER INSPECTION
SHOWN: A FAN BLADE MANUFACTURED ON WAYLAND’S TECHNOLOGY
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