3D Printing Stainless Steel

onsdag den 19. august 2020 kl. 23.04.16 UTC+2 skrev Fred Bloggs:

afaiu it is pretty much a normal 3d printer, the material is just a metal powder with in a plastic binder, after printing it is sintered in an oven

There are metal printers that use laser sintering of each layer.

sinter : to cause to become a coherent mass by heating without melting

How can steel powder ever become integrated without melting? Sounds like brittle steel.

Thanks. So it gets very close to melting where it's probably not a true solid any more.

Yes. Imagine one floating soap bubble bumping into another and the two bubbles being pulled together by the surface tension, fusing into a single object.

Or try putting a bunch of ice cubes into a plastic bag, and you've got the idea--material flows/diffuses between the cubes at every point of contact.

Close to the melting point, the process is greatly accelerated.

Particles in pre-sintered metal objects flow together into a nearly solid object when sintered, with typically 97-99% solid void-free metal.

Cheers, James Arthur

Hot isostatic pressing (aka HIPping) makes fully-dense sintered metals. It's a very cool technique that I'm pretty sure you already know about. but others may not.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs