Paging Dr. O

AM Community Shows Off at RAPID + TCT

“Sometimes you might want to perform a direct cladding operation, such as fusing a nickel alloy over copper to increase its strength,” Lang noted. “That combination provides a nice bond, but let’s say you need to go from steel to titanium. That’s not going to happen without a third or even fourth transition metal, which can be introduced at any point during the build or in any area.

but that it’s now time to begin focusing on manufacturing readiness levels. This will help streamline the qualification process and make what has traditionally been a lengthy and costly process into a more streamlined data-based approach, comparable to when a company goes out and buys a new CNC machining center, laser cutter, or any other piece of manufacturing equipment.

Kip Hanson

Contributing Editor

FormAlloy Technologies’ Directed Energy Deposition (DED) printer boasts five axes of motion, closed-loop control systems, multiple wavelength lasers, and powder feeders able to deposit up to 16 different alloys in the same build.

Olga Ivanova Master networker RAPID + TCT Director of Technology Mechnano

Olga Ivanova has 3D-printed plenty of interesting parts during her time in manufacturing.

Rocket nozzles. Turbine blades and impellers. Neonatal tracheostomy tubes. There are more, which we’ll get to in a moment, but to Star Wars fans, it’s the Static Dissipative Yoda that’s most intriguing.

“We’re also able to add multiple materials simultaneously, perform hardfacing, create complex geometries, and produce high-quality, repeatable parts up to 100x faster than competing systems,” she said. “And because our system is equipped with significant in-situ monitoring and our powerful DEDSmart control system, we automatically generate a digital twin and build report of the finished workpiece for validation and material development purposes.”

Advanced capabilities aside, Lang suggested that the AM community has plenty of work left to do before widespread adoption can occur. She said the industry has done a good job of developing its technology readiness levels,

“We printed a bunch of Yoda and Groot (Guardians of the Galaxy) figurines for high school students who visited our facility recently,” said Ivanova, director of technology at Mechnano, an additive manufacturing materials developer near Phoenix. “It’s our way of getting young people interested in additive manufacturing.”

“Overall, additive remains very challenging, and if a customer wants to get into it, they have to jump through quite a few hoops,” Lang cautioned. “There’s the material and process qualification part of it, which is getting easier, but the act of building parts is still fairly difficult for the average shop and requires significant investment in time and resources. Similar to when I first started making stuff at home 12 years ago, you had to be fairly technically savvy.

Padawan Learning

“Now almost anyone can pick up a low-end printer for a few hundred bucks and be printing plastic chess pieces within a few hours,” she continued. “We need this same level of usability to enable additive—and especially metal additive—to become mainstream. That’s something that we at FormAlloy have worked at, and I’m proud to say are close to achieving. It’s been an exciting journey.”

She’s quick to point out that those educational giveaways were made of a gray-colored base resin, not the more expensive static dissipative material (which is black) that she spends much of each day working with—and yes, which she occasionally uses to print Yodas that are just as resistant to electrical charge as they are to the Dark Side of the Force.