Metal Additive Manufacturing, Vol. 8 No. 1 Spring 2022

Prefer a PDF download? Click here

In addition to the latest industry news, this 232-page issue of Metal Additive Manufacturing magazine includes the following exclusive features:

Making the unmakeable:
How metal AM is bringing the aerospike rocket engine to life

The history book of engineering is filled with concepts that failed to achieve success because they were ahead of their time. This was almost the case for the aerospike rocket engine, recognised in the 1950s as a strong concept and tested by NASA in the 1980s and 1990s, but found to demand too much of the manufacturing and materials technology available at the time.

Metal AM magazine spoke with Pangea Aerospace and Aenium Engineering about reinventing the aerospike for the 21^st century, and how Additive Manufacturing allowed them to ‘make the unmakeable’ – pushing their expertise in AM, materials science and Design for AM to its limits in the process.

Seurat Technologies: Evolving AM to finally out-compete conventional manufacturing

Every so often, something comes along that gets the whole Additive Manufacturing industry talking.

Over the past two years, few companies have generated as much intrigue as Seurat Technologies, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory spin-out named for the French pointillist, bringing with it a technology roadmap that promises to evolve metal AM to the crucial point of out-competing conventional manufacturing methods.

In this Metal AM exclusive, James DeMuth, Seurat CEO, offers the deepest look yet into the technology behind his company’s promise.

What does a decades old metal powder titan bring to Additive Manufacturing? In conversation with Höganäs AB

The metal Additive Manufacturing landscape is filled with ambitious, well-funded startups, all promising a wealth of materials innovation and ambitious value propositions.

In contrast to these newcomers, Höganäs AB has been a powerful force in the metal powder market for near eighty years, producing half a million tonnes of metal powder annually. Is there a role for such a titan of Powder Metallurgy in the brave new world of AM?

Emily-Jo Hopson-VandenBos spoke to Kennet Almkvist, president, Höganäs Customization Technologies, about what the company brings to the table.

Innovation to commercialisation:
Atherton Bikes and the journey of an SME bringing AM production in house

Bringing Additive Manufacturing in house is a big step for any company, but when you are at the small end of the ‘SME’ spectrum, it can be an especially bold move.

Robin Weston recently visited Atherton Bikes, based in rural west Wales, to see how this specialist bike producer is enjoying ramping up in-house production of its titanium and carbon fibre performance mountain bikes on a new, four-laser Powder Bed Fusion (PBF-LB) machine from Renishaw.

A game of hide and seek with Renishaw and Altair:
AI-powered quality assurance on the fly

Is it possible to actively monitor the huge volumes of data from a Laser Beam Powder Bed Fusion (PBF-LB) machine to identify, through machine learning (ML), build errors as they happen? To answer this question, Renishaw and Altair played a unique game of hide and seek.

In this innovative experiment, an error was deliberately hidden in a build for an artificial intelligence (AI)-based solution to find. The hope? True ‘on the fly’ quality assurance for Additive Manufacturing processes for accelerated product development, and dramatically reduced post-production quality checks.

Opening the discussion: How the humble bottle opener demonstrates the importance of requirements in AM

Designs not driven by requirements increase the risk of an incomplete solution. This relatively simple statement gets to the heart of how designers need to be approaching AM, particularly when balancing the ‘design freedoms’ offered by the technology with the reality of viable and profitable production.

Through an exploration of the ubiquitous AM bottle opener, John Barnes, Jennifer Coyne and Chelsea Cummings, The Barnes Global Advisors, and Jon Meyer, APWorks, explore how, by focusing on requirements, a data-driven approach ensures fully functional designs that deliver on multiple requirements for the lowest cost.

Constellium Aheadd^® CP1 alloy: Breakthrough productivity in PBF-LB Additive Manufacturing

A collaborative study between Constellium SE, a global leader in aluminium materials headquartered in Paris, France, and a leading German AM research institute, has developed a new alloy which paves the way for cost-effective and high-performance AM components in series production. In this article, Constellium’s Dr Bechir Chehab and Syam Unnikrishnan present the company’s Aheadd^® CP1 alloy, revealing cutting-edge productivity, very good mechanical properties, and the possibility to reduce Laser Beam Powder Bed Fusion (PBF-LB) processing costs by up to 65%.

Metal powder characterisation: standards and test methods for consistent quality in AM

While Additive Manufacturing uses some powder characterisation methods similar to those used in conventional metal powder technologies, it is necessary to define additional properties critical for repeatable, reliable AM.

ASTM International’s Dr Alexander Liu, Head of Additive Manufacturing Programs – Asia Region, Singapore, and Dr Rafi Khalid, Sr Lead, Additive Manufacturing Programs Development, Singapore, outline the key metal powder characteristics for AM and their significance, as well as discuss the industrial test methods and standards AM part makers rely on to maintain consistent quality

Euro PM2021: Advances in the processing of nickel alloy 718 and molybdenum by Laser Beam Powder Bed Fusion

A technical session in the programme of the virtual Euro PM2021 conference, organised by the European Powder Metallurgy Association (EPMA) and held October 18-22, 2021, focused on issues related to the processing of nickel-base alloys and refractory metals by Laser Beam Powder Bed Fusion (PBF-LB) Additive Manufacturing. Dr David Whittaker reviews four papers that address microstructure control, lattice optimisation and chemical post-processing parameters for IN718, and the AM of molybdenum.

< Back to archive