Additive Manufacturing Consortium Announces Projects for 2022

By: Buffalo Manufacturing Works Team | February 24th, 2022

Continued Assessment of New Metal AM Technologies – Geared toward following new and emerging technologies in the AM industry, this ongoing project will highlight and evaluate new manufacturers, machines and materials that are coming to the market. Selected products will be reviewed further, and sample parts obtained for more detailed evaluation of system performance.

Investigation into Low Angle Printing Without Supports – A recent push to develop capabilities for L-PBF printing at low angles without any support has prompted several companies to develop new systems and software toward this end. This project will review these various systems, complete test builds, and evaluate for quality and performance.

Optimizing L-PBF Process Parameters for Thin Wall Structures – This project aims to develop and optimize process parameters for creating thin walls (less than 0.5mm thick). It will examine a variety of factors from processing parameters, build angle, designed vs. actual wall thickness, surface finish and porosity.

Continued Investigation into Multi-Laser L-PBF Systems Focusing on Overlap Techniques – This project extends the study of part properties built using various multilaser systems from EOS, SLM & Renishaw. Each system offers a different method of digitally blending the interface between the individual lasers. The goal is to understand the nuances in the blend area and how those methods affect microstructure and porosity.

Continued Evaluation of Factors Affecting AS Built Surface Finish on L-PBF – Several past AMC projects have looked at ways to characterize surface finish of AM parts as well as variation in surface finish across the build plate and at various build angles. This project will focus specifically on the relationship and sensitivity of key process variables that can affect surface finish such as surface angle, layer thickness, orientation, contour parameters that affect energy density. The relation between corrosion and surface roughness will also be studied.

If you would like to learn more about these projects and the AMC, contact Mark Barfoot at [email protected] or click here.