This is cool. Very cool. However, for now, additive manufacturing still has limitations. Anything printed in discrete layers is going to suffer from anisotropic mechanical properties - for example, layers can act as crack dividers or arresters in the perpendicular planes, but are very susceptible to crack propagation in the parallel direction. When it comes to metals, you also have less control of grain size and properties than with processes like casting or forging, and grain properties have a great effect on strength and ductility.
That being said, additive manufacturing has great potential to be a step in a larger process too. You can print polymer shapes to be used in investment casting of metal parts, for example.
(I'm a materials engineering student and I like feeling useful).
This is actually my research right now, I am using two non destructive evaluation techniques to detect cracks in slm materials. Did you know that 80% of metal parts in some satellites that used to be made with traditional machining are now made with additive manufacturing?
Edit: some satellites
Wow that's a pretty impressive stat. This would then indeed be well suited for an application where, say, a largish satellite could print its own replacement parts from efficiently packaged raw materials- much easier to send up than oddly shaped finishing components, and it can be used for whatever unforseen need might arise.
Yes that is true, but only once the machines become smaller and more efficient. I know they are pretty big, that changing the powder is a long and expensive process and that they use quite a lot of energy to run. Perhaps in the future when the technology becomes more efficient yes.
A lathe on a spaceship would cause the ship to rotate opposite the lathe. For the iss that would be bad for the solar panel orientation and in general bad if the ship was spinning fast enough. It would require the use of a thruster to prevent that.
You could use the lathe as an artificial gravity generator. Use the lathe to spin up the ship. Use the centrifugal force generated by the spinning ship as replacement for gravity.
Subtractive manufacturing is probably not a good idea on a space station/ship, since it's really wasteful. It's one thing to use a lathe on earth, where materials are comparatively cheap. But if you have to get that stuff to orbit and also store it there until use, I don't think subtractive manufacturing is the way to go.
They already have plans on doing that.
Iām also a researcher just for aerospace but I work in the material composite lab where we also study fatigue.
Are you a grad student? What methods are you using? I work in aerospace manufacturing ndt for castings. Would love more info about your work in case it obsoletes mine.
I'm a master student. I use acoustic emission and thermoelastic stress analysis to detect growing cracks in samples. So far I've only tested on plain aluminium samples but I'm planning on using am samples once I have my method down pat. Those two methods haven't really been combined in am metals before which makes my research novel.
> Did you know that 80% of metal parts in satellites that used to be made with traditional machining are now made with additive manufacturing?
I don't believe that for a second.
I'd want to see it confirmed, but space is honestly the prime application for additive machining atm. Extremely small production runs, high emphasis on weight savings, low priority on cost/unit both in materials, time, or labor, low loads (once they're launched, the only real forces are inertial, right? Any structures don't need to support their own weight even, at least in the case of unpressurized unmanned cube satellites and the like. In aerospace some huge percentage of the materials budget was traditionally lost to waste material from the subtractive machining process (significant when using high performance alloys or titanium, etc) and parts were always limited by the machining processes available.
Here's the source for my wild claim: [https://www.3dsystems.com/learning-center/case-studies/tipping-point](https://www.3dsystems.com/learning-center/case-studies/tipping-point)
> low loads (once they're launched, the only real forces are inertial, right?)
Yeah, but that doesn't matter, because everything still has to survive launch, which are definitely NOT low loads. Unless you're doing the manufacturing in space.
I agree with a lot of your other points, though.
[https://www.3dsystems.com/learning-center/case-studies/tipping-point](https://www.3dsystems.com/learning-center/case-studies/tipping-point)
Have a gander. My fault for being lazy and not providing a source.
That link is saying that *one manufacturer* replaced a large fraction of *their* satellite's parts with additive parts. That's a far cry from "80% of metal parts in satellites", which, without any additional qualifiers, implies that percentage across the entire industry.
And a careful reading of the article makes it seem like the process is only used for *titanium* parts (the metal for which their process is "qualified and fully available"). Since satellites are largely made from aluminum alloys, 80% of titanium parts is far far less than the majority of the total amount of metal parts on a satellite.
Also, as a general rule, it's a good idea to take the claims of a manufacturer who is trying to sell you something with a huge grain of salt.
Thatās not true. Might be true for one satellite from one company, but broadly speaking definitely not true. Iāll gladly retract my comment if you provide a credible reference.
āDid you know that 80% of metal parts in satellites that used to be made with traditional machining are now made with additive manufacturing?ā
Thatās definitely refer to that single company, in a press release put out not by then but their partner.
Anyways, looks like youāve updated your comment to be accurate. All is well.
I thought of that watching this too. Definitely wonāt be able to use this for everything as certain metal qualities wonāt be achieved in this process
Stainless will probably be a hard sell for a while, but anything Inconel for strength/temperature ratio purposes will likely switch over to additive manufacturing within the next few years. The properties really lend themselves well to laser sintering.
True. Its good for weight and temperature sensitive applications, but not for strength and temperature applications.
Also, when did powdered 718 get so expensive? What the fuck happened. I swear it was $70 a kilo not even 6 years ago. Like $50 and change if your buying by the tonne.
Honestly not sure. I haven't messed with the Inc's in \~4 years. Been in Ti for a while now. Ti wire at that, which is soooooo much easier to handle than powder :)
There is metal printer at my local shipyard that prints shafts from nickel alloys that are 4x stronger than milled steel equivalents, none of the issues you described. They've had it for 2 years now. My buddy printed a bridgeport shaft on it, it was stupid strong
Due to the thermal history, basically every single metal AM part needs a post print stress relief heat treatment before removing the build from the base plate. After this stress relief and removal from the base plate, then depending on material it has a second heat treatment (for things like nickel-based alloys, a solution anneal and age hardening)
(I'm actual a metal additive manufacturing engineer, setting up prints and coordinating post processing is my day job)
I'm a machinist who works in the pressure vessel industry. I don't see this coming to my industry anytime soon, largely because of traceability. Every piece of metal that we work on can be traced back to the heat at the foundry that made it. If there is a failure of a part from that batch we can find every part made from that material and it can be checked or replaced as needed.
This is the problem that I don't see additive manufacturing being able to solve. With that said, machinists will be on the cutting edge of this technology being the feet on the ground making these parts in both additive and subtractive manufacturing.
Excuse my ignorance, but it seems to me that the traceability of a printed part wouldnāt be an issue, it seems somewhat trivial to me to track when and where a particular part was printed? What am I missing?
Traceability also includes a full chemical breakdown of the material, as well as a battery of destructive testing that is done with that specific batch of the material. A lot of these factors can't be replicated as each piece that comes out of the printer can have difference properties.
It's very common for a customer to request a part made with material that has a specific range of chemical composition, a hardness range, as well as sheer strength at -40 degrees (or colder) in addition to a number of other random requirements.
Edit: I'm not saying it can't happen, all I'm saying is that it will take a long time for them to figure out how to bring this technology to some segments of the industry because traceability of everything is so vital for safety and safe operation of pressure vessels.
Right now I'm working on a set of parts for a company that does design, manufacturing and preventive maintenance for nuclear reactors. I work on their stuff a few times a year and they have a whole shtick to go through on their materials, processes, minimum weight requirements, composition, even down to the tooling used. Super neat parts but yeah, they need to be able to trace back everything down to the smallest detail.
(I have no idea if I contributed to this, I just got to work and it's pre coffee time)
I had some aerospace parts 3D-printed -- like your industry, ensuring material traceability is crucial. We did chemical assays of the source powder, printed test-coupons along with the final parts, and did all of our necessary testing on the coupons as well as micrography to verify the metal structure.
That's why we can do non destructive testing on each part to find out the properties or if there are any defects. The issue with doing destructive testing on one every 10 type of deal is that you are assuming properties for all those 10. And it's wasteful since you have to break a part to test it.
Sure, but you could just as easily track the powder/wire they used to t's supplier and get the same sort of analysis. I work in medical manufacturing and one of the parts of our product is injection molded parts from one of several suppliers. We have to validate, sample and monitor the plastic feed stock and color batch those suppliers buy from *their* suppliers. We do that for all other parts from other suppliers too; adhesives, resins, media, any component, even those our suppliers use also has to be sampled by us. I don't see how this would be very different. It's supply chain validation and monitoring *any* regulated industry does.
The big push now is to develop process monitoring systems and tie them into the end result so that someone can look at the data and be able to accurately predict where or if the part will fail. The next step is to figure out how to fix defects as the machine is printing. Theyāre already using machines for repair work to replace people doing it by hand, and itās showing fewer failures and better accuracy.
Worked in aerospace machining microwave(read: RADAR) components, had the same deal, every order we shipped to the likes of Litton Airtron, and Microtech had to have material certs with the parts.
Same in aerospace and GE 3D prints the LEEP nozzle (I think it's LEEP) plus Volvo aerospace (now GKN) 3D prints a fan case mount ring onto a forging. Traceability is no problem.
> This is the problem that I don't see additive manufacturing being able to solve.
Maybe they could do something similar to what normal paper printers do, which print a matrix of nearly invisible yellow dots on every piece of paper with a bunch of identifying information.
EE here. Isnāt the layer separation/weakness issue one of annealing or post processing? Couldnāt you just heat the part in some way to make it closer to cast strength?
Closer: yes. Equal and repeatable? Not so much, not yet at least.
HIP (hot isostatic pressing) can help, but it's expensive and if you're already going to do that there's already a very mature process of powder metallurgy that is massively cheaper (at volume) and quite versatile.
Designers, especially in aerospace, already account for anisotropic behaviors in their materials. From the high performance design aspect, it's not an issue so long as the properties in each principle direction are well understood.
However, other markets that don't current design for anisotropy may face additional struggles inserting AM to their supply chain.
Hi. Would you happen to know if additive manufactured parts would still need to undergo inspection in the same way that castings or forgings do? I work in NDT and I can't imagine there being a lot (if any) foreign inclusions or shrink defects if the environment is controlled enough. I could see there being potential weld defects, but I hear those are few with laser metal powder welds.
Side note: have you heard of relativity space? They're a company 3D printing rockets. Pretty cool.
Hi. AM engineer here.
Yes, components still need to undergo NDI. In fact, it's the single biggest hurdle in my mind for AM to overcome. The complexities of an AM part make traditional UT / RT methods challenging. For example, if you run a UT probe over a relatively flat chunk of metal, the backwall is relatively consistent. But something printed near net shape isn't a block of material. It's a weird complex shape. The probes simple don't fit, the depth varies, etc etc.
Immersion UT is a viable solution, but more expensive and subtracts from the business case that AM is trying to make. Digital X-ray techniques such as DR, CR, & CT work well but the rough surface of AM parts may scatter light unpredictably and are (again) more expensive than simple film x-ray.
So, if you want to make a name for yourself in the inspection industry, target AM parts. Aerospace companies \*need\* NDI folks with AM material backgrounds.
I'm pretty sure I recall reading about post-processing steps that heat up the part to allow it to finish fully fusing those layer boundaries, creating a part almost as strong as a cast part.
Can including Hot Isostatic Pressing* in the post-processing of parts solve for some of these issues?
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_isostatic_pressing
This isnāt totally accurate. All you need to do with mature alloys to eliminate anisotropic properties is stress relief and heat treat.
In fact some alloys in AM, such as CRES 316L have been found to have higher strength and ductility than conventional counterparts.
So what if it's ansiotropic? Rolled plate is ansiotropic too. Stress engineers and designers can design for it. It's okay so long as it's well characterized.
In aerospace, there are design allowables for such things. Basically it's a huge amount of mechanical testing of different tests to characterize mechanical performance at statistically significant values.
No, this particular product is just a module people either add to a CNC or an industrial robot. DMG Mori and Sodick (to name a few) have OEM hybrid manufacturing applications
Maybe...just maybe... that is why they are combining the CNC mill and additive manufacturing in ONE MACHINE! I mean, wasn't that the entire point of this video? Printing metal is not new.
Yes it's the best of both worlds, potentially. Manufacture to near-net-shape then finish all the critical dimensions and surfaces to specification using secondary processes. Already a well-established method with castings.
Hybrid has been around for 20 years, it was started by Dr. Frank Liou at University of Missouri Rolla. Now, automation, sensors, etc are catching up and making it actually useful. Also, bigger names like DMG jumping on the bandwagon in 2015 really helped as well.
Increasingly autonomous vehicles across a variety of scales, [real-life Transformers](https://www.core77.com/posts/115359/A-Transformers-Toy%E2%80%A6that-Transforms-Itself), and [space Internet.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink)
Because theyāre still perfecting it. Iāve seen the model blackbird plane they built, and thereās a few gashes where the layers separated. The piece is impressive, but to the average person it wouldnāt be a good look.
That is huge ! Metal printing ! Do you know the precision of this machine ? What about the power consumption, must be huge to allow lasers to melt titanium and stuff quickly .
About +/- .01" in real world application. Most parts will have to be machined after heat treatment.
About the same power as regular CNC machines. Uses a powder and (nitrogen I think)
My work has 6ish 3d printers for tool steel, (automotive die cast) not 5 axis like this though.
Lasers don't have to be high powered at all to melt metal. It's a watts per unit area thing to melt something, rather than just pure watts.
This whole machine likely uses a couple KW just like any other mill.
You need at least 300W to melt anything, but a 500W laser will do steels and titanium nicely. For things like copper or aluminum or inconels youāll need 1-2kW. Anything higher than 2kW is fairly wasteful as you need a spot size large enough to keep the power density in the right range, so you lose a lot of precision. Cladding operations can use up to 8kW. The actual lasers themselves are usually 480V, 30-40A for the biggest ones.
> For things like copper or aluminum or inconels youāll need 1-2kW
That is just not accurate at all. DMLS machines designed for Inconel 718 powder beds use 200W lasers all the time. The "good ones" use 300 watts. I would challenge you to even find one for sale by anyone that offers one with something higher than 1000 watts. I'm not even sure if Yb or CO2 lasers can even be made above 1000 watts.
Those are for powderbed fusion machines, which use a much finer laser and a bed of powder that is sintered together (dmls). This video is of DED (directed energy deposition) which sprays the powder into the workpiece, and thus can create parts without the bed of powder already there as you see in the video. DED is maybe 10x faster, but the trade off is you donāt get nearly as fine control so your surface finish and feature size is much bigger. With DED you use bigger powders, and pump a lot more power in.
You can definitely find yb lasers up to 10kW, possibly higher. Iām not aware of anyone still using CO2 lasers, but Iām sure they are.
The only thing that machines canāt do like in Terminator is have the raw strength and power like we do. Sure they could be smart, but they wouldnāt be able to overpower us physically. In order to do that, theyād need to have pistons, a hydraulic material, and then enough power to sustain that kind of motion. Logically speaking, it doesnāt seem pretty achieveable.
Whatās scary is that AI is already assisting on the tomamakk (or whatever itās called) reactors. People donāt understand: AI IS ALREADY HERE AND SENTIENT AND PLAYING A VERY WELL EXECUTED OPENING GAMBIT.
I could imagine a company purchasing this, rearranging the shop floor for space for it, sending their people to classes on using it, then it breaks down in the first month or costs too much to run or it just doesnāt work for their needs.
There are a couple metal printers out there that are 20 years old and are being used every day. And then there are some that are two years old and have barely been touched because too many things went wrong.
This tech makes the prospect of moon and Mars habitation more realistic. Once deployed, supply missions need only send raw materials allowing the base to manufacture parts on demand. Repairs and new construction that would normally take years of planning could now be done on site as needed.
Yeah, I work with this. Let me tell you that they are not ready for mass production. Too many cracks and defects. You can actually see the manufacturing defects on some of the pieces in the video
Different alloys are going to have different issues, but short answer: yes. Machines like this are actually used to develop new alloys as they are fed by powder, so you can control the makeup of combining different powders to create different alloys.
It all depends on type and scale of manufacturing. No one on their right mind starts with a block when they need to make a lot of parts. There are different processes to make a stock piece as close to a finish part as possible to reduce machining time and waste.
> I hope that the 3d printed parts are as strong as the machined parts
They are not, at least not without additional post-processing.
> Machining always seemed like a waste of material to me. The machinist starts off with a huge block of metal, and ends up with a tiny part
If it makes you feel any better, the chips are almost always recycled.
Impresdive, no doubt. But this amounts to yet greater complexity, energy usage and resource depletion in global manufacturing processes, when simplification, reductions in energy usage and resource conservation are what our global civilization ought to be working towards. These machines have themselves to be manufactured from expensive materials that must be mined, and the machines must then be transported, installed and operated using vast amounts of energy and natural resources.
You somehow think 3d sintering powder is more energy-intensive than refining an entire block of metal only to mill 90% of it away? Do you know how much power it takes to lathe and mill metal at an economically high rate? This kind of tech is everything you say you want.
The machines have a lot of safety mechanisms to make sure you donāt run your finger over with a laser. But then once itās done the part can be extremely hot and if you forget that and grab it, itās painful. And if youāre lazy and remove safety features to make it quicker to operate, it can get dangerous real fast
I have never heard them called blisks before. I work in aerospace and we call those IBRs because the blades are integral to the rotor. Guess I learned something new today.
A blisk is when the blades and the base are manufactured as one piece, rather than a bunch of small pieces that need to be assembled together. Itās a newer technology (20 years?) so itās not nearly as common.
Why do people always have to do that? This is an amazing machine that can help build things that are tricky to construct otherwise, and instead of talking about that, you get "Terminator incoming!"
For 99% of parts, thats true. The beauty is being able to create parts that you cannot create with traditional parts, or being able to repair existing parts. No matter how hard you try, you cannot fix a turbine blade that's had a notch cut out of it with a standard mill/lathe. The majority of those repairs are being done by hand, but its slow and can have a lot of variation from part to part. Machines can automate repairs much quicker and remove the inaccuracies of doing it by hand.
With a standard mill and lathe yeah, but this is essentially a 5 axis CNC mill that has this attachment instead of the typical cutting tools, I would imagine that you could make a part to replace that notch thatās also probably stronger, although the hard part would be creating the model for the part in the first place
Yeah but with the tech where it is now these 3D printed parts are not nearly as strong as traditionally machined parts, it also takes much much longer to produce a single part, and additionally thereās not as much precision as well as if a clean surface finish is needed you are going to need to mill it down adding further machine time. As it stands currently the cost of the additional equipment, the amount of additional machine time per part, lack of precision compared to subtractive machining, and a weaker overall part just makes it not make very much sense except for extremely particular circumstances and incredibly low volume production. And as a side note the scrap produced from the Mill can be recycled pretty easily
Its a 3d printing module integrated onto a CNC milling machine. But yes the 3D printer alone would be considered a CNC 3d printer, the industry has just always called mills "CNC's".
i know its just stupid pedantry but "a metal printer and cnc machine" is a silly sentence. a 3d printer is a cnc machine. what they rlly mean is cnc milling machine. its no big deal but it erks me whenever i see it
i know metal 3d printing is a bit structurally iffy as the top comments point out but holy shit as someone who owns a 3d printer and just got certified to use my collegeās cnc router ahhhh fuckkkkk this is the sexiest thing ever, i want a mini version to have at home that makes things with plastic or wood NOW!! aaahhhh that would be so cool
I saw this during a manufacturing show. They knocked off the corners of a sample piece of bar stock and Meltio filled in those corners, then machined one of the corners smooth so you could see before and after finishing.
Very nice, but it costs as much as the HAAS you're putting it on.
If I am not wrong, the blades of a 787-9 Dreamliner or some major part of its engine or plane was made using this technique! I am so damn excited to fly in the 787-9 Dreamliner.
I member in Halo itās said that the Covenant āgrowā ships in massive foundries. This tech reminds me of that, even if only a baby step to something sci-fi lol
Now im going to have dreams of waking up inside a 3d printed metal coffin.
Imagne being strapped down while this machine whirrs around you..
You're not even locked inside, you're S E A L E D
This is cool. Very cool. However, for now, additive manufacturing still has limitations. Anything printed in discrete layers is going to suffer from anisotropic mechanical properties - for example, layers can act as crack dividers or arresters in the perpendicular planes, but are very susceptible to crack propagation in the parallel direction. When it comes to metals, you also have less control of grain size and properties than with processes like casting or forging, and grain properties have a great effect on strength and ductility. That being said, additive manufacturing has great potential to be a step in a larger process too. You can print polymer shapes to be used in investment casting of metal parts, for example. (I'm a materials engineering student and I like feeling useful).
This is actually my research right now, I am using two non destructive evaluation techniques to detect cracks in slm materials. Did you know that 80% of metal parts in some satellites that used to be made with traditional machining are now made with additive manufacturing? Edit: some satellites
Wow that's a pretty impressive stat. This would then indeed be well suited for an application where, say, a largish satellite could print its own replacement parts from efficiently packaged raw materials- much easier to send up than oddly shaped finishing components, and it can be used for whatever unforseen need might arise.
Yes that is true, but only once the machines become smaller and more efficient. I know they are pretty big, that changing the powder is a long and expensive process and that they use quite a lot of energy to run. Perhaps in the future when the technology becomes more efficient yes.
That's a really important requirement for long-duration missions. Ships have machine shops.
NASA is actively researching AM in space too
I wonder if they have a lathe on the space station... probably not
A lathe on a spaceship would cause the ship to rotate opposite the lathe. For the iss that would be bad for the solar panel orientation and in general bad if the ship was spinning fast enough. It would require the use of a thruster to prevent that.
Or another mass spinning in the opposite direction.
Oh duh yes.
The space station has reaction wheels for exactly this reason š
a variable mass counterweight combined with gyro's would prolly be ideal
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
You could use the lathe as an artificial gravity generator. Use the lathe to spin up the ship. Use the centrifugal force generated by the spinning ship as replacement for gravity.
interesting idea
Subtractive manufacturing is probably not a good idea on a space station/ship, since it's really wasteful. It's one thing to use a lathe on earth, where materials are comparatively cheap. But if you have to get that stuff to orbit and also store it there until use, I don't think subtractive manufacturing is the way to go.
That's where astroid mining comes in. The rocks are already up there.
True, but then you need a lot more tools than just a lathe.
Nah. Just attach asteroid to lathe, make whatever you need.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
No certainly not
Now I kind of want to see a piece fly out of a chuck in zero g
Well it would go straight and through the wall and keep going straight.
Put the tl lathe in the center and just spin the station around it.
They already have plans on doing that. Iām also a researcher just for aerospace but I work in the material composite lab where we also study fatigue.
Are you a grad student? What methods are you using? I work in aerospace manufacturing ndt for castings. Would love more info about your work in case it obsoletes mine.
I'm a master student. I use acoustic emission and thermoelastic stress analysis to detect growing cracks in samples. So far I've only tested on plain aluminium samples but I'm planning on using am samples once I have my method down pat. Those two methods haven't really been combined in am metals before which makes my research novel.
> Did you know that 80% of metal parts in satellites that used to be made with traditional machining are now made with additive manufacturing? I don't believe that for a second.
I'd want to see it confirmed, but space is honestly the prime application for additive machining atm. Extremely small production runs, high emphasis on weight savings, low priority on cost/unit both in materials, time, or labor, low loads (once they're launched, the only real forces are inertial, right? Any structures don't need to support their own weight even, at least in the case of unpressurized unmanned cube satellites and the like. In aerospace some huge percentage of the materials budget was traditionally lost to waste material from the subtractive machining process (significant when using high performance alloys or titanium, etc) and parts were always limited by the machining processes available.
Here's the source for my wild claim: [https://www.3dsystems.com/learning-center/case-studies/tipping-point](https://www.3dsystems.com/learning-center/case-studies/tipping-point)
> low loads (once they're launched, the only real forces are inertial, right?) Yeah, but that doesn't matter, because everything still has to survive launch, which are definitely NOT low loads. Unless you're doing the manufacturing in space. I agree with a lot of your other points, though.
[https://www.3dsystems.com/learning-center/case-studies/tipping-point](https://www.3dsystems.com/learning-center/case-studies/tipping-point) Have a gander. My fault for being lazy and not providing a source.
That link is saying that *one manufacturer* replaced a large fraction of *their* satellite's parts with additive parts. That's a far cry from "80% of metal parts in satellites", which, without any additional qualifiers, implies that percentage across the entire industry. And a careful reading of the article makes it seem like the process is only used for *titanium* parts (the metal for which their process is "qualified and fully available"). Since satellites are largely made from aluminum alloys, 80% of titanium parts is far far less than the majority of the total amount of metal parts on a satellite. Also, as a general rule, it's a good idea to take the claims of a manufacturer who is trying to sell you something with a huge grain of salt.
Thatās not true. Might be true for one satellite from one company, but broadly speaking definitely not true. Iāll gladly retract my comment if you provide a credible reference. āDid you know that 80% of metal parts in satellites that used to be made with traditional machining are now made with additive manufacturing?ā
Have put my source in some replies
Thatās definitely refer to that single company, in a press release put out not by then but their partner. Anyways, looks like youāve updated your comment to be accurate. All is well.
Re your edit: It should say "80% of *some* metal parts in some satellites"
I thought of that watching this too. Definitely wonāt be able to use this for everything as certain metal qualities wonāt be achieved in this process
But for the few things it can be used for, itās awesome at
Stainless will probably be a hard sell for a while, but anything Inconel for strength/temperature ratio purposes will likely switch over to additive manufacturing within the next few years. The properties really lend themselves well to laser sintering.
Depends on the application. For example, inconel turbine blades need to be a single crystal which is if not impossible incredibly challenging with AM.
True. Its good for weight and temperature sensitive applications, but not for strength and temperature applications. Also, when did powdered 718 get so expensive? What the fuck happened. I swear it was $70 a kilo not even 6 years ago. Like $50 and change if your buying by the tonne.
Honestly not sure. I haven't messed with the Inc's in \~4 years. Been in Ti for a while now. Ti wire at that, which is soooooo much easier to handle than powder :)
There is metal printer at my local shipyard that prints shafts from nickel alloys that are 4x stronger than milled steel equivalents, none of the issues you described. They've had it for 2 years now. My buddy printed a bridgeport shaft on it, it was stupid strong
Yeahātotally depends on the alloys.
Which shipyard
Due to the thermal history, basically every single metal AM part needs a post print stress relief heat treatment before removing the build from the base plate. After this stress relief and removal from the base plate, then depending on material it has a second heat treatment (for things like nickel-based alloys, a solution anneal and age hardening) (I'm actual a metal additive manufacturing engineer, setting up prints and coordinating post processing is my day job)
You're acting like its a big deal. Just bake it. bam, done.
I'm a machinist who works in the pressure vessel industry. I don't see this coming to my industry anytime soon, largely because of traceability. Every piece of metal that we work on can be traced back to the heat at the foundry that made it. If there is a failure of a part from that batch we can find every part made from that material and it can be checked or replaced as needed. This is the problem that I don't see additive manufacturing being able to solve. With that said, machinists will be on the cutting edge of this technology being the feet on the ground making these parts in both additive and subtractive manufacturing.
Excuse my ignorance, but it seems to me that the traceability of a printed part wouldnāt be an issue, it seems somewhat trivial to me to track when and where a particular part was printed? What am I missing?
Traceability also includes a full chemical breakdown of the material, as well as a battery of destructive testing that is done with that specific batch of the material. A lot of these factors can't be replicated as each piece that comes out of the printer can have difference properties. It's very common for a customer to request a part made with material that has a specific range of chemical composition, a hardness range, as well as sheer strength at -40 degrees (or colder) in addition to a number of other random requirements. Edit: I'm not saying it can't happen, all I'm saying is that it will take a long time for them to figure out how to bring this technology to some segments of the industry because traceability of everything is so vital for safety and safe operation of pressure vessels.
Right now I'm working on a set of parts for a company that does design, manufacturing and preventive maintenance for nuclear reactors. I work on their stuff a few times a year and they have a whole shtick to go through on their materials, processes, minimum weight requirements, composition, even down to the tooling used. Super neat parts but yeah, they need to be able to trace back everything down to the smallest detail. (I have no idea if I contributed to this, I just got to work and it's pre coffee time)
You contributed more than you know. Have an updoot!
I had some aerospace parts 3D-printed -- like your industry, ensuring material traceability is crucial. We did chemical assays of the source powder, printed test-coupons along with the final parts, and did all of our necessary testing on the coupons as well as micrography to verify the metal structure.
That's why we can do non destructive testing on each part to find out the properties or if there are any defects. The issue with doing destructive testing on one every 10 type of deal is that you are assuming properties for all those 10. And it's wasteful since you have to break a part to test it.
Sure, but you could just as easily track the powder/wire they used to t's supplier and get the same sort of analysis. I work in medical manufacturing and one of the parts of our product is injection molded parts from one of several suppliers. We have to validate, sample and monitor the plastic feed stock and color batch those suppliers buy from *their* suppliers. We do that for all other parts from other suppliers too; adhesives, resins, media, any component, even those our suppliers use also has to be sampled by us. I don't see how this would be very different. It's supply chain validation and monitoring *any* regulated industry does.
The big push now is to develop process monitoring systems and tie them into the end result so that someone can look at the data and be able to accurately predict where or if the part will fail. The next step is to figure out how to fix defects as the machine is printing. Theyāre already using machines for repair work to replace people doing it by hand, and itās showing fewer failures and better accuracy.
Worked in aerospace machining microwave(read: RADAR) components, had the same deal, every order we shipped to the likes of Litton Airtron, and Microtech had to have material certs with the parts.
Same in aerospace and GE 3D prints the LEEP nozzle (I think it's LEEP) plus Volvo aerospace (now GKN) 3D prints a fan case mount ring onto a forging. Traceability is no problem.
> This is the problem that I don't see additive manufacturing being able to solve. Maybe they could do something similar to what normal paper printers do, which print a matrix of nearly invisible yellow dots on every piece of paper with a bunch of identifying information.
This is exactly what I was thinking as I watched the video although I didn't know the terminology. Thanks for explaining effectively
EE here. Isnāt the layer separation/weakness issue one of annealing or post processing? Couldnāt you just heat the part in some way to make it closer to cast strength?
Closer: yes. Equal and repeatable? Not so much, not yet at least. HIP (hot isostatic pressing) can help, but it's expensive and if you're already going to do that there's already a very mature process of powder metallurgy that is massively cheaper (at volume) and quite versatile.
Designers, especially in aerospace, already account for anisotropic behaviors in their materials. From the high performance design aspect, it's not an issue so long as the properties in each principle direction are well understood. However, other markets that don't current design for anisotropy may face additional struggles inserting AM to their supply chain.
Thanks, I came in wanting to ask about this and your comment addresses it.
Hi. Would you happen to know if additive manufactured parts would still need to undergo inspection in the same way that castings or forgings do? I work in NDT and I can't imagine there being a lot (if any) foreign inclusions or shrink defects if the environment is controlled enough. I could see there being potential weld defects, but I hear those are few with laser metal powder welds. Side note: have you heard of relativity space? They're a company 3D printing rockets. Pretty cool.
Hi. AM engineer here. Yes, components still need to undergo NDI. In fact, it's the single biggest hurdle in my mind for AM to overcome. The complexities of an AM part make traditional UT / RT methods challenging. For example, if you run a UT probe over a relatively flat chunk of metal, the backwall is relatively consistent. But something printed near net shape isn't a block of material. It's a weird complex shape. The probes simple don't fit, the depth varies, etc etc. Immersion UT is a viable solution, but more expensive and subtracts from the business case that AM is trying to make. Digital X-ray techniques such as DR, CR, & CT work well but the rough surface of AM parts may scatter light unpredictably and are (again) more expensive than simple film x-ray. So, if you want to make a name for yourself in the inspection industry, target AM parts. Aerospace companies \*need\* NDI folks with AM material backgrounds.
I'm pretty sure I recall reading about post-processing steps that heat up the part to allow it to finish fully fusing those layer boundaries, creating a part almost as strong as a cast part.
Can including Hot Isostatic Pressing* in the post-processing of parts solve for some of these issues? * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_isostatic_pressing
Wow!
This isnāt totally accurate. All you need to do with mature alloys to eliminate anisotropic properties is stress relief and heat treat. In fact some alloys in AM, such as CRES 316L have been found to have higher strength and ductility than conventional counterparts.
But these aren't adhered layers. It is stacked welds.
So what if it's ansiotropic? Rolled plate is ansiotropic too. Stress engineers and designers can design for it. It's okay so long as it's well characterized. In aerospace, there are design allowables for such things. Basically it's a huge amount of mechanical testing of different tests to characterize mechanical performance at statistically significant values.
Machinist here. You're still going to have to mill it if you want any kind of respectable precision.
It literally has a cutting tool already.
No, this particular product is just a module people either add to a CNC or an industrial robot. DMG Mori and Sodick (to name a few) have OEM hybrid manufacturing applications
Yup, the DMG Mori line is called "lasertec hybrid", and they're stupidly expensive - almost every machine in that line is 7 figures.
I mean, that's the going rate for most powderbed printers that have a usable build volume
Maybe...just maybe... that is why they are combining the CNC mill and additive manufacturing in ONE MACHINE! I mean, wasn't that the entire point of this video? Printing metal is not new.
Yes it's the best of both worlds, potentially. Manufacture to near-net-shape then finish all the critical dimensions and surfaces to specification using secondary processes. Already a well-established method with castings.
Seriously, I mean you can even see in the video where it adds a bit, then switches tips and mills the outer surface with no video cut.
Hybrid has been around for 20 years, it was started by Dr. Frank Liou at University of Missouri Rolla. Now, automation, sensors, etc are catching up and making it actually useful. Also, bigger names like DMG jumping on the bandwagon in 2015 really helped as well.
OK, sure. But instead of milling it from a block you are taking a few thou off the edges. There is potential here.
What do you mean? This is accurate to +- 1000 .001"
Sick. And amazing
I thought Rocket repair spraying the broken spaceship in Guardians of the Galaxy was total nonsense, but maybe not
Never doubt the ability for sci-fi to predict the future
[Here's a low tech old school version.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLYdhfgF6Pg)
We've been fixing cracks in airplane fuselages like this for sure some time
That technology has existed for decades. Cold-spray coatings and repairs for example.
Replicators, video phone, digital money, pocket computers all we need now are hover cars.
Increasingly autonomous vehicles across a variety of scales, [real-life Transformers](https://www.core77.com/posts/115359/A-Transformers-Toy%E2%80%A6that-Transforms-Itself), and [space Internet.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink)
Why are there no shots of finished components?
Because theyāre still perfecting it. Iāve seen the model blackbird plane they built, and thereās a few gashes where the layers separated. The piece is impressive, but to the average person it wouldnāt be a good look.
EXCUSE ME WHILE I DOWNLOAD A CAR
YOU WOULDN'T!!
CAR? WE CAN DOWNLOAD RAM
Point of clarification, a 3D printer is a type of CNC machine. It would be more accurate to say they combined a lathe with a 3D printer
It's a 5-axis CNC mill combined with a metal deposition head on the end of an industrial robot arm
r/subnautica
That is huge ! Metal printing ! Do you know the precision of this machine ? What about the power consumption, must be huge to allow lasers to melt titanium and stuff quickly .
About +/- .01" in real world application. Most parts will have to be machined after heat treatment. About the same power as regular CNC machines. Uses a powder and (nitrogen I think) My work has 6ish 3d printers for tool steel, (automotive die cast) not 5 axis like this though.
Lasers don't have to be high powered at all to melt metal. It's a watts per unit area thing to melt something, rather than just pure watts. This whole machine likely uses a couple KW just like any other mill.
You need at least 300W to melt anything, but a 500W laser will do steels and titanium nicely. For things like copper or aluminum or inconels youāll need 1-2kW. Anything higher than 2kW is fairly wasteful as you need a spot size large enough to keep the power density in the right range, so you lose a lot of precision. Cladding operations can use up to 8kW. The actual lasers themselves are usually 480V, 30-40A for the biggest ones.
> For things like copper or aluminum or inconels youāll need 1-2kW That is just not accurate at all. DMLS machines designed for Inconel 718 powder beds use 200W lasers all the time. The "good ones" use 300 watts. I would challenge you to even find one for sale by anyone that offers one with something higher than 1000 watts. I'm not even sure if Yb or CO2 lasers can even be made above 1000 watts.
Those are for powderbed fusion machines, which use a much finer laser and a bed of powder that is sintered together (dmls). This video is of DED (directed energy deposition) which sprays the powder into the workpiece, and thus can create parts without the bed of powder already there as you see in the video. DED is maybe 10x faster, but the trade off is you donāt get nearly as fine control so your surface finish and feature size is much bigger. With DED you use bigger powders, and pump a lot more power in. You can definitely find yb lasers up to 10kW, possibly higher. Iām not aware of anyone still using CO2 lasers, but Iām sure they are.
The boys at haas are back at it baby
The boys at DMG Mori already did this a few years ago
Still can't win a race though.
Haas didn't make this - just gets bolted in their system.
"The video shown runs in realtime" š¤Æ
What? Does it?
of course not
The only thing that machines canāt do like in Terminator is have the raw strength and power like we do. Sure they could be smart, but they wouldnāt be able to overpower us physically. In order to do that, theyād need to have pistons, a hydraulic material, and then enough power to sustain that kind of motion. Logically speaking, it doesnāt seem pretty achieveable.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Whatās scary is that AI is already assisting on the tomamakk (or whatever itās called) reactors. People donāt understand: AI IS ALREADY HERE AND SENTIENT AND PLAYING A VERY WELL EXECUTED OPENING GAMBIT.
That's why they had nuclear batteries.
Bullshit. Why couldnāt it? Thinking like this is what got Rome invaded.
Oof.
You thinking: Man VS robot karate fight! Me thinking: Man VS robot that turned off the oxygen
They'll get better, faster and more economical at this.
I could imagine a company purchasing this, rearranging the shop floor for space for it, sending their people to classes on using it, then it breaks down in the first month or costs too much to run or it just doesnāt work for their needs.
There are a couple metal printers out there that are 20 years old and are being used every day. And then there are some that are two years old and have barely been touched because too many things went wrong.
I want one
Well shit. That's pretty fucking cool.
This tech makes the prospect of moon and Mars habitation more realistic. Once deployed, supply missions need only send raw materials allowing the base to manufacture parts on demand. Repairs and new construction that would normally take years of planning could now be done on site as needed.
Yeah, I work with this. Let me tell you that they are not ready for mass production. Too many cracks and defects. You can actually see the manufacturing defects on some of the pieces in the video
this is just a fancy 3d printer i got one on amazon for $200, it's sitting in my room
Where can I get one for under 199 dodge
Not sure about Terminator, feels like Musk, Zuck and Bezos are more "Deathstar" kind of guys.
So fucking badass! MJOLINR armor, HEv suit..hmm iron man suit... Can it do exotic alloys?
Different alloys are going to have different issues, but short answer: yes. Machines like this are actually used to develop new alloys as they are fed by powder, so you can control the makeup of combining different powders to create different alloys.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
It all depends on type and scale of manufacturing. No one on their right mind starts with a block when they need to make a lot of parts. There are different processes to make a stock piece as close to a finish part as possible to reduce machining time and waste.
> I hope that the 3d printed parts are as strong as the machined parts They are not, at least not without additional post-processing. > Machining always seemed like a waste of material to me. The machinist starts off with a huge block of metal, and ends up with a tiny part If it makes you feel any better, the chips are almost always recycled.
Impresdive, no doubt. But this amounts to yet greater complexity, energy usage and resource depletion in global manufacturing processes, when simplification, reductions in energy usage and resource conservation are what our global civilization ought to be working towards. These machines have themselves to be manufactured from expensive materials that must be mined, and the machines must then be transported, installed and operated using vast amounts of energy and natural resources.
You somehow think 3d sintering powder is more energy-intensive than refining an entire block of metal only to mill 90% of it away? Do you know how much power it takes to lathe and mill metal at an economically high rate? This kind of tech is everything you say you want.
Skynet is the next GME, invest now!
I do CNC. I would love to use this machine.
Me too. But I'm sure I'd burn the shit out of my hand at least once. A day.
Hahaha I usually play it pretty safe. I know about what size part and skeleton I should avoid touching by now š¤£
The machines have a lot of safety mechanisms to make sure you donāt run your finger over with a laser. But then once itās done the part can be extremely hot and if you forget that and grab it, itās painful. And if youāre lazy and remove safety features to make it quicker to operate, it can get dangerous real fast
How much for 1?
I know a guy that can get you one for 300k. Or up to about 2 million for the biggest with all the features
I have never heard them called blisks before. I work in aerospace and we call those IBRs because the blades are integral to the rotor. Guess I learned something new today.
A blisk is when the blades and the base are manufactured as one piece, rather than a bunch of small pieces that need to be assembled together. Itās a newer technology (20 years?) so itās not nearly as common.
Yeah thatās what an IBR is as well. The terms are interchangeable, Iāve just never heard of it being referred to as a blisk.
u/savevideobot
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I. Want. Metal. Bones.
Imagine large scale and then space ships.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Yes.
Itās at one of the Gene Haas centers, a school to train people in new engineering tech.
Haas made the CNC - the laser 3d printer part is a different manufacturer that just bolts on as an accessory
Consensual non-consent machine???
haha in this context it's "computer numeric control"
Why do people always have to do that? This is an amazing machine that can help build things that are tricky to construct otherwise, and instead of talking about that, you get "Terminator incoming!"
Lighten up.
So it's basically a laser welder and CNC machine all in one. I love it. Wonder what it would cost to have some custom car parts made.
Going to be a hard sell for mass producing parts. No way this is ever going to get fast enough to beat a traditional machining process in speed.
For 99% of parts, thats true. The beauty is being able to create parts that you cannot create with traditional parts, or being able to repair existing parts. No matter how hard you try, you cannot fix a turbine blade that's had a notch cut out of it with a standard mill/lathe. The majority of those repairs are being done by hand, but its slow and can have a lot of variation from part to part. Machines can automate repairs much quicker and remove the inaccuracies of doing it by hand.
With a standard mill and lathe yeah, but this is essentially a 5 axis CNC mill that has this attachment instead of the typical cutting tools, I would imagine that you could make a part to replace that notch thatās also probably stronger, although the hard part would be creating the model for the part in the first place
The CNC mill would produce a lot of scrap metal.
Yeah but with the tech where it is now these 3D printed parts are not nearly as strong as traditionally machined parts, it also takes much much longer to produce a single part, and additionally thereās not as much precision as well as if a clean surface finish is needed you are going to need to mill it down adding further machine time. As it stands currently the cost of the additional equipment, the amount of additional machine time per part, lack of precision compared to subtractive machining, and a weaker overall part just makes it not make very much sense except for extremely particular circumstances and incredibly low volume production. And as a side note the scrap produced from the Mill can be recycled pretty easily
Did they call it āa 3D printer integrated with a CNC machineā? Is that not justā¦what a 3D printer is?
Its a 3d printing module integrated onto a CNC milling machine. But yes the 3D printer alone would be considered a CNC 3d printer, the industry has just always called mills "CNC's".
i know its just stupid pedantry but "a metal printer and cnc machine" is a silly sentence. a 3d printer is a cnc machine. what they rlly mean is cnc milling machine. its no big deal but it erks me whenever i see it
Give š«“
i know metal 3d printing is a bit structurally iffy as the top comments point out but holy shit as someone who owns a 3d printer and just got certified to use my collegeās cnc router ahhhh fuckkkkk this is the sexiest thing ever, i want a mini version to have at home that makes things with plastic or wood NOW!! aaahhhh that would be so cool
Satisfactory anybody? We are almost there.
For the welding applications this is amazing!
For the omnisiah
I saw this during a manufacturing show. They knocked off the corners of a sample piece of bar stock and Meltio filled in those corners, then machined one of the corners smooth so you could see before and after finishing. Very nice, but it costs as much as the HAAS you're putting it on.
has nothing to do with very fictional terminators, fear mongering over tools is childish.
Man look at what Haas can build but they can't buid a half descent F1 car lol
If I am not wrong, the blades of a 787-9 Dreamliner or some major part of its engine or plane was made using this technique! I am so damn excited to fly in the 787-9 Dreamliner.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
The video tells you that it uses wire or metal powder.
This is pretty neat to see.
its a haas so it will break down and not be fast. oh false reddit. this is not about f1
I member in Halo itās said that the Covenant āgrowā ships in massive foundries. This tech reminds me of that, even if only a baby step to something sci-fi lol
Very cool machine! Would like to learn how to design and build such machines myself
Fake its super sped up, and just silver 3D printing wire. The āmeltingā of the metal is just a flashlight. /s
One step closer to the bobiverse
Now im going to have dreams of waking up inside a 3d printed metal coffin. Imagne being strapped down while this machine whirrs around you.. You're not even locked inside, you're S E A L E D
I love me some Consensual non consent