
3D Printing High-Strength Aluminum - jonbaer
https://futurism.com/engineers-have-found-a-way-to-3d-print-super-strong-aluminum/
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jordanb
So like all the other "3d printed" metals this appears to be laser-sintered.

This is the big bait and switches of the 3d printing world: You take a
consumer process (heating up ABS and mushing it together) and conflate it with
an industrial process (laser-sintering) so that the public thinks that 3d
printed aluminum will soon be available in their maker bot.

The story here is that some researches have developed some aluminum alloys
with good mechanical properties that can be laser-sintered.

This means they can be used in an industrial additive manufacturing process
that has as much in common with your 3d printer as a drop forge has with a
panini press.

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mbell
There are a few SLS printers that are approaching home/SB use pricing, <$10k.
I don't think CO2 lasers are _that_ expensive to build so I would imagine
pricing can drop a fair bit if the volume gets there.

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opencl
Sintering metals requires _far_ more powerful lasers than the the cheaper SLS
models have, the cheapest models capable of sintering aluminum are much closer
to the million dollar mark. The ultra-cheap-market-disrupting-startup Desktop
Metal is supposedly going to have something for $120k soon which is an
enormous leap over what's currently available but I doubt it'll hit hobbyist
level pricing anytime remotely soon.

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Pica_soO
Just wait till consumers find out how toxic those fumes and particles really
get with laser-sintering- and the whole market evaporates anyway.

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derefr
Compared to $120k for the printer, getting a fume hood installed in your house
would be a pretty negligible cost.

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Animats
What they mean by "high-strength aluminum" is "not worse than regular solid
aluminum". Some 3D printing processes produce a material much weaker than the
raw material. Filament-type printers are notorious for this.

Here's laser deposition welding.[1] Works fine. Slow. Has to be done in an
inert atmosphere.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2foaRi4nxM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2foaRi4nxM)

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csours
I wonder if anyone is exploring metallic foams as an orthogonal technology.

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hwillis
Metal lattices have been a pretty common 3d printing thing for a while, but
its obviously cheaper to make them traditionally. Most metals print more
easily than aluminum- aluminum is highly dependent on precipitation
hardening/aging, to the point that it never would have been used in airplanes
otherwise.

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noir_lord
6000 and 7000 series aluminimiums are used a lot in road bicycles so that
would seem like a natural application outside of heavy industrial/automative
applications.

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aidenn0
I wonder if there are novel shapes of bicycles that could be enabled by this;
a triangle made out of tubes has a good strength-to-weight ratio, but perhaps
it could be improved?

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hwillis
I doubt you could do anything to a bike frame with this that you couldn't with
foam-core carbon fiber. The advantage 3d printing over CFRP is cost is
constant with intricacy and number of joints. That means its best for
skeletonizing to a small scale or lightening really intricate parts, and
expensive for large, sweeping parts (like the shape of a frame).

So, you could skeletonize things like brake levers/mechanisms to a much higher
degree than with older aluminum alloys. The ultimate limit to skeletonizing
something is the tensile strength since each member basically becomes a wire
eventually. At that point its strength is determined by the tension it can
sustain rather than the bending force.

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TamDenholm
Very interesting but they didnt actually say how they made the non-weldable
metal, weldable. Would be interested to know what it is they actually did.

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tyingq
This article has more detail.

[https://www.seeker.com/tech/materials/nanoparticles-
keep-3d-...](https://www.seeker.com/tech/materials/nanoparticles-
keep-3d-printed-alloys-from-cracking)

 _" They used a computer program to sort through and analyze more than 4,500
different alloy and nanoparticle combinations to see which ones had atomic
structures that would fit together best. The idea was that the grains of metal
would glom onto the tiny nanoparticles, sort of like a water vapor droplet
that nucleates around a particle of dust to create a drop of rain. They found
that a nanoparticle made of hydrogen-stabilized zirconium would work best with
two different kinds of aluminum alloys."_

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hwillis
u/fibbonachi11235 had a really fantastic couple of comments on the materials
science[1] when this hit r/3dprinting.

[1]:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/3Dprinting/comments/71cnq6/high_str...](https://www.reddit.com/r/3Dprinting/comments/71cnq6/high_strength_aluminum_now_3d_printable/dna21p1/)

