I'ts neat, but it's not that new and it has pretty limited use cases due to the poor surface quality, which albeit has improved from earlier wire-feed systems.
Norsk Titanium has been doing wire-feed 3D printing for many years, and is even delivering FAA certified parts made using a similar wire-feed deposition system and plasma arc as the power source. Looks like the laser gives you a higher resolution surface finish, but all those parts are going to still need machining on most of their critical surfaces for real world use anyway. You cannot tolerate a surface finish like that on a fatigue critical part. You also can't do dye penetrant or mag particle inspection on a surface like that without getting all kinds of spurious indications. Once you have the part clamped and indexed in the CNC to machine the bores and mounting features you might as well skim the whole thing.
The carrot is that you get near-forging strength levels without having to buy a very expensive, very very long-lead closed-die titanium forging, or having buy an pretty expensive rectangular forged rectangular block of titanium and machining 90% of it away.
BTW that 3D printed lobed exhaust noise supressor is cute and all but that thing would fall to bits in hours if installed on a real jet aircraft.
One of the interesting use-cases in the video is machining the part while it's being printed. This lets you machine inside surfaces and do a few things that would usually be tricky to do. Thinking of inside-machined almost closed manifolds. I think inserts and multi-material also open up some interesting design possibilities.
Norsk Titanium has been doing wire-feed 3D printing for many years, and is even delivering FAA certified parts made using a similar wire-feed deposition system and plasma arc as the power source. Looks like the laser gives you a higher resolution surface finish, but all those parts are going to still need machining on most of their critical surfaces for real world use anyway. You cannot tolerate a surface finish like that on a fatigue critical part. You also can't do dye penetrant or mag particle inspection on a surface like that without getting all kinds of spurious indications. Once you have the part clamped and indexed in the CNC to machine the bores and mounting features you might as well skim the whole thing.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/norsk-titanium-components-as_...
https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/11/15256008/3d-printed-titan...
The carrot is that you get near-forging strength levels without having to buy a very expensive, very very long-lead closed-die titanium forging, or having buy an pretty expensive rectangular forged rectangular block of titanium and machining 90% of it away.
BTW that 3D printed lobed exhaust noise supressor is cute and all but that thing would fall to bits in hours if installed on a real jet aircraft.