Metal powder bed “3D printing”, or additive manufacturing (AM), enables the production of metallic parts in a resource efficient manner. Parts, such as aero-engine components, can be designed to give lighter, energy-efficient structures and designers are given freedom beyond the constraints of conventional manufacturing processes.
Electron beam melting (EBM) is an AM technology that uses an electron beam to melt powder into 3D printed parts. It has been developed in Europe by Arcam, with machines being sold since 2006. The EBM process has been successfully adopted for producing medical parts, such as implants, in pure titanium or titanium alloys such as Ti6Al4V (Ti64). Ti64 is a mixture of titanium, vanadium and aluminum. These materials are processed in the EBM vacuum chamber at rather moderate working temperatures, around 600-700 C.
However, the aero-industry has not yet fully adopted EBM for production. The demands for using other alloying metal materials are high, materials that will work in extreme environments where they are subjected to high pressure and heat. When processing such materials, the working temperature in the EBM chamber must be raised to almost 1000C. This will impose new and much tougher requirements on the EBM technology. For example, reproducibility problems and the lack of a quantified measure for process quality assurance need to be overcome to qualify EBM for such demanding application.
The objective of this project is to develop the next generation of Arcam EBM 3D printers. A new improved and more robust electron beam generating source will be developed in combinations with new process controlling routines. This will enable 3D printing of complex geometries in metallic materials, which are not possible to manufacture efficiently by todays systems.
This project aimed to increase the performance of the electron beam melting (EBM) process in terms of the electron beam’s robustness and capacity. The project is a success with results providing excessive value to the Arcam organization. The results will increase the performance of EBM and strengthen the competitiveness of Arcam, considerably.
