ESA 'Amaze' Project Aims To Take 3D Printing 'Into the Metal Age' 74
dryriver sends this BBC report:
"The European Space Agency has unveiled plans to 'take 3D printing into the metal age' by building parts for jets, spacecraft and fusion projects. The Amaze project brings together 28 institutions to develop new metal components which are lighter, stronger and cheaper than conventional parts. Additive manufacturing (or '3D printing') has already revolutionized the design of plastic products. Printing metal parts for rockets and planes would cut waste and save money. The layered method of assembly also allows intricate designs — geometries which are impossible to achieve with conventional metal casting. Parts for cars and satellites can be optimized to be lighter and — simultaneously — incredibly robust. Tungsten alloy components that can withstand temperatures of 3,000C were unveiled at Amaze's launch on Tuesday at London Science Museum. At such extreme temperatures they can survive inside nuclear fusion reactors and on the nozzles of rockets. 'We want to build the best quality metal products ever made. Objects you can't possibly manufacture any other way,' said David Jarvis, ESA's head of new materials and energy research."
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well. there is a difference.
that there's already processes that have been already used to create objects impossible to create by forging and machining. so they're more or less just jumping aboard the bus...
Flaming RepRaps (Score:2)
geometries which are impossible to achieve
Now they just need to work out the Transformations that were too hard to find.
Just beware of poisons in your bloodstream.
Re:Oh yes yes (Score:5, Insightful)
And yet everyday we are using alloys, materials, and medicines that 40 years ago were all but a dream.
Hybrid synthetic fibers, hell the metal alloy's used in your cell phone, and laptop didn't have mass production status 40 years ago. 40 years ago building things at sub 100nm processing was considered all but impossible.
The real trick isn't when it is first possible to do something or even when it is available to a select few, but when any idiot can do it. The microwave oven took 15 years to go from proof of concept to an affordable counter appliance. and another 10 years for decent ideas on how to use it practically.
Metal 3D printing is a good 20+ years from everyday use. but it starts today.
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Metal 3D printing is a good 20+ years from everyday use. but it starts today.
Technically, it started like 30 years ago, and we've been using manual additive welding for much longer than that, but who's counting...
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> The microwave oven took 15 years to go from
> proof of concept to an affordable counter
> appliance. and another 10 years for decent
> ideas on how to use it practically.
It didn't take that long. My parents were using our microwave to reheat coffee since the day they brought it home. (30 years later, that's still its #1 use.)
ew, ick (Score:2)
Reheated coffee is suitable only when there are no more fresh beans available.
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You must be American.
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Or someone recognizing that coffee is the vehicle of a drug delivery system and that that someone needs some WD-40 for the brain NOW, not in however long it takes to make a new cuppa.
When I creak and groan and hobble out of bed if there's a half-mug of coffee from last night I don't even bother nuking it. THEN I can proceed to combine nicely-roasted beans and filtered water into something more palatable. If there's no coffee when I awake do not approach unless maybe the house is burning - and even then I
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Wrong. The microwave oven was invented in 1945, thirty five years before they were affordable. Citation [wikipedia.org]
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I heard the same nonsense about manufacturing in space 40 years ago. Impossible alloys! Precious pure medicines! Yeah, right. Grow up you loons, you're being had.
40 years ago cell phones were sci-fi fantasies. Flat screens were sci-fi fantasies. Recording TV shows in your living room was a fantasy. Playing a record album (not a cassette) in you car was my schizophrenic friend's fantasy (I told him he was nuts. He was, but we have CDs in cars now). There were no treatments for schizophrenia, now many schizop
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Fuel injection has been around for a lot longer than 40 years. Other than that I tend to agree with you.
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Yes, it was invented and in limited use (racing), but it wasn't widespread in passenger cars until the eighties.
loose acronym (Score:2)
Amaze is a loose acronym for Additive Manufacturing Aiming Towards Zero Waste and Efficient Production of High-Tech Metal Products
I got AMATZWAEPOHTMP ... not even close. Sounds like someone just really wanted to spell a word from all that
Lasers + 3D printing = Nerdgasm (Score:5, Informative)
Here's a "How it's Made" about the process from almost 3 years ago.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6Px6RSL9Ac [youtube.com]
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Thanks for the vid.
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Yeah, but it's gonna go big soon. Some important patents expire next year.
Flame spray has been around since 1910... (Score:2)
... but I don't know when numerical control was first done for it? My father worked on a system to put metal on the bottom of ceramic cookware to improve heat conductivity at METCO in the 1980s, although even then that was done by hand for tests. Flame spray was commonly used then to build up worn metal shafts for repairs. From:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_spraying [wikipedia.org]
"In classical (developed between 1910 and 1920) but still widely used processes such as flame spraying and wire arc spraying, the particl
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Holy... wow. This and a handful of other posts were eye-openers for me. Thanks, all. Sheesh, I gotta get out more. I mean, I can sort of forgive my ignorance because of not having need for exposure in this area, but to be that ignorant of it...
My limit was wood working. People who do stuff in metals have always amazed me. Even straight-forward mill work is neat; then add in 'tuned' forging, heat treating, all that, it's half-magic to me, let alone the ways to forecast and arrive at particular crystall
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Yeah, it is amazing what is possible technologically compared to politically/socially. I wrote a related essay here: :-) These points come from the multiplication of the "social" points times the "technical" points.
"Getting to 100 social-technical points"
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/openmanufacturing/BByqMARHqOw [google.com]
"One can think of it this simplified way. Imagine abundance for all takes a society earning 100 "social-technical" points.
So, 50 * 2 = 100.
Or, 2 * 50 = 100.
or, 10 * 10 = 100.
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First of all is the really important question, "Does this guy ever sleep?" The answer, of course, is yes. He's cloned himself several times and has learned how to do effective, conflict-free, brain copying.
I like the soc-tech points, never seen it laid out like that, and it makes easy sense and calc, once one arrives at how to go about assigning those points to begin with. Actually, back of the envelope WAG calculation is neat, it allows for slop and helps show the shapes of things (which is not a shabby
You mean DMLS? (Score:3)
Um....people have already been doing this for some time now [wikipedia.org]. News that would be interesting to me would be to make 3d metal printing semi-affordable for the common hacker since most of these machines cost around $1,000,000. Right now 3d printing molds for metal casting is the only practical solution.
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Re:You mean DMLS? (Score:4, Informative)
We have/had a Cold Spray machine here at work. Not a lot of business for it, so it's not active right now. You could just mix in various titaniums, steels, aluminum and make all types of fun semi-alloys. You could even mix plastic or other materials in there to get some really interesting and crazy materials, but none of them really exhibited true alloy-like characteristics. The most practical thing I saw it do was a local machine shop botched the job on the final pass of this hugely expensive large precision titanium piece that would require them to junk it and start over. We cold-sprayed the gouge back in and then they re-machined it correctly, saving tons of time, money and effort.
Problem is that alloys or unique materials nearly always get their unique properties due to the unique circumstances with which they were formed. There's always interesting steps to ensure that the bonds are as expected, like extreme pressure or heat, being under various gas blankets or fluids when combining, etc.
This is just melty where Cold Spray was deformative.
I mean this is cool. You can make some really neat things, but exotic alloys or new materials is definitely not one of them.Yea, you could stack materials or "thread" them together, but we're already pretty good at that using massive presses.
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This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (September 2013)
Damned right it does because it's incorrect if it's what I saw demonstrated at SIU in the late seventies (although that one may have been a hot spray, it's been an awful long time ago).
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Re: You mean DMLS? (Score:2)
Very cool. Thanks for sharing.
Re:Scary Implication... (Score:4, Insightful)
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couple hundred?? What country are you in? In the USA, average selling price for an illegal revolver (gun most likely to be used in crime) is something like $40...
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Right, but after that $250,000 investment, you can print as many as you want with no risk of getting caught every time you want another gun.
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For the low investment cost of, say, $250,000, you can own a machine that laser-sinters metal into something that will allow you to make most parts of a gun with the possible exception of the springs. Or, you could ya know, buy a gun on the black market
Today, $250,000. Ten years down the road, $2,500 and then you can churn out each gun for a marginal cost of $10 with absolutely no worries that the guy who sold you the materials is actually an undercover cop working an illegal weapons sting.
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If the price of lasers capable of rapidly smelting highly durable metals drops to 1/100th of their price in 10 years, I'm going to become a lot less worried about the people worried about shitty printed guns, and a lot more worried about asshats with lasers capable of rapidly smelting highly durable metals
Nothing new there. (Score:4, Insightful)
You know, if you want to just automatically churn out metal gun parts, you could do it with a CNC mill for a fraction of the cost. It's not like automated metalworking is a new thing. The plastic gun was mostly a stunt -- a dangerous one at that.
Or if you were willing to put in the time and elbow grease yourself, you could mill your own parts by hand for a fraction of that with power tools bought from Home Depot. It's not like there isn't a wealth of material at your fingertips on the internet from a devoted community of paranoid "gotta be able to make this myself once the gubbermint takes mah gun away" people to get you started. As a bonus, many of these people are smart and meticulous (despite my teasing), and it's all legal with the right licenses, so the material's more trustworthy than your average Anarchists's Cookbook nonsense.
And if you really don't care about having a polished, reusable model to show off, zip guns can be made with entirely off the shelf parts found in your local tool store too.
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Have you ever tried to hand-fit a 1911 from individual parts, and blend the contours of the grip safety, mainspring housing and the frame into each other using only a dremel tool? Man, 3D printing will make it gloriously easy!
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Why exactly is that scary? Are guns particularly hard to get a hold of, or manufacture? /NewsToMe
Contradiction (Score:3)
There seems to be a contradiction between this illustration [bbcimg.co.uk] and the following quote, both which appeared in the article;
"One common problem is porosity - small air bubbles in the product. Rough surface finishing is an issue too," he said.
It would seem that a rough porous ball bearing would not be that effective.
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Slide bearings are customary made sintered, since you can push oil through the bearing bush itself to lubricate the works.
One of the disadvantages is that you can't widen them with a simple lathe because that closes the pores.
Finally (Score:1)
I've been waiting for car vending machines for a year now.
Testing and Quality (Score:2)
I bet... (Score:2)
"you wouldn't download a ..." oops (Score:2)
There's people out there that'd do that just to piss off Lars.
Strength (Score:1)
Whenever they talk about strength they talk about using strong materials like tungsten. But most strong parts in the real world are made by forging weak (and cheap) materials like iron, to fix the crystal structure for the desired properties. I don't see how 3D printing will address this. If strength is only available via strong materials then applications will be severely limited.
Really? (Score:1)
Who the hell wrote this? (Score:2)
Right. That's all we need.
SpaceX already does it... (Score:2)
Hmm... isn't this already being employed by SpaceX? Just look at the 3D design video and at the 3 minute mark Elon describes how they send the design straight to laser-metal printer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNqs_S-zEBY [youtube.com]
So ... what else is new?