No Limits: Manufacturing the most complex parts with VELO3D

WORDS: LAURA GRIFFITHS

"We are focusing on manufacturing and on driving these machines and the ecosystem to the manufacturing supply chain.”

VELO3D's Sapphire system.

Just for a moment, forget everything you think you know about metal additive manufacturing (AM).

Leave your preconceptions around additive-only geometries, post-processing afflictions and machines on every factory floor, and enter VELO3D.

The California-based company, which officially launched its debut AM system onto the market last year, is on a mission, supported by more than 90 million USD in funding, to make additive viable for high volume manufacturing and is doing so with a fresh outlook on the industry.

‘Manufacturing’ over ‘printing’ is the crucial distinction here as the company’s Co-Founder and CEO, Benny Buller told TCT:

“VELO3D is really about being able to make any geometry. The difference between [manufacture and print] is that when you're in manufacturing, you have to do it in a reproducible way. And you have to do it with quality.”

Heat exchangers frequently have large surfaces that are very thin to allow for effective heat transfer across the interface. VELO3D's Sapphire can build as high as a 500:1 ratio in any given direction on the build plate.

Manufacturing impossible parts is a familiar claim of the additive industry but as those close to the technology know all too well, is not so straightforward, as Buller discovered when first investigating the technology as an investor back in 2014.

“You think about the idea of ‘complexity is free’ and you can do anything. When I saw the actual status of the technology, I was shocked at how limited it is. I found that the reason is the limitations that supports impose on the geometry,” Buller explained. “I started to talk with a few people that I knew were engaging with the technology and trying to use it for making products. I asked them, ‘what's the issue? How big is this limitation? How valuable would it be to remove that?’ And the answer was, ‘Oh, that would be super valuable but don't worry about that because there's nothing you can do about this,’ this was how it was.”

That frustration lit the spark for the development of VELO3D's Intelligent Fusion, a laser powder-bed fusion metal AM technology capable of building complex parts with overhangs and angles of less than 10 degrees, as well as large diameters and inner tubes up to 40 mm, with less dependence on supports.

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