Current news about additive manufacturing/3D printing

Fieldmade’s NOMAD 03 micro factory – a mobile, deployable additive manufacturing (AM) system – is now capable of producing aluminum parts using Equispheres NExP-1 non-explosive aluminum powder, expanding the range of metals that can be processed in the field. Featuring tunable parameters for a wide range of applications, Equispheres NExP-1 powder will be leveraged for field operations to achieve rapid build speeds as well as part quality and repeatability in onsite production, significantly reducing the time and cost of delivering replacement parts.

This expands the availability of laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) from traditional manufacturing environments to remote and field locations where safe handling and performance are critical.

The NOMAD 03 system incorporates AM technologies customized and ruggedized for mobile applications. Equispheres NExP-1 aluminum powder is dust-free and non-explosible per ASTM E1226, Standard Test Method for Explosibility of Dust Clouds. The optimized AlSi10Mg powder provides high layer thickness processing rates, melt pool stability, and consistent melting behavior to improve system performance and mechanical properties of finished parts.

Equsipheres
https://equispheres.com

Fieldmade
https://fieldmade.com

Multi-laser industrial 3D printer

All-digital aerospace component manufacturer Sintavia has commissioned the first multi-laser industrial 3D printer in North America equipped with nLIGHT AFX beam shaping fiber laser systems. The twin 1.2kW lasers, installed on an AMCM M290-2, allow industrial 3D printer operators to modulate beam spot size and shape without any loss of power and material density, resulting in more productive, less wasteful builds.

Laser beam shaping systems such as nLIGHT improve laser productivity over the Gaussian laser shape standard across powder bed fusion (PBF) additive manufacturing (AM). Beam shaping allows fully dense material to be melted at a diameter more than 3x greater than standard laser systems, meaning that standard layer thicknesses currently used by the industry (typically 30µm to 45µm) can be doubled or tripled without any loss of material performance. Since a part can be printed using fewer layers, less condensate (the metal vapor jet generated during the PBF process) is produced. By fully melting thicker build layers without losing density, grain size in the Z-direction is increased, resulting in improved material performance – particularly for applications with high creep requirements.

nLIGHT
https://www.nlight.net

Sintavia
https://sintavia.com

Titanium metal AM powder qualified

Manufacturing technology company TRUMPF has qualified 6K Additive’s titanium metal powder for use in TruPrint additive manufacturing (AM) systems. The qualification assures customers 3D-printed parts will meet their most stringent requirements with the lowest environmental impact.

“We continue to hear from our aerospace and defense customers asking us to help lower the barriers for qualification for their applications,” says Frank Roberts, president of 6K Additive. “The collaboration between our two companies did just that by ensuring the machine and powder are qualified ahead of their own internal qualification, which will streamline the customer’s process into production faster. We’re excited to work with the TRUMPF team on titanium and other powders in our portfolio going forward.”

6K Additive produces sustainably sourced AM powder using its UniMelt production-scale microwave plasma process, which precisely spheroidizes metal powders while controlling the chemistry and porosity of the final product with zero contamination and high throughput.

6K Additive
https://www.6kinc.com/6k-additive

TRUMPF
https://www.trumpf.com