Aurora Labs marked a milestone on their journey towards large-scale industrial metal 3D printing.
The Australian company announced theyâve managed to complete testing of their new Large Format Technology (LFT) metal 3D printing process. This process is different from the process used on their initial machine, which was primarily used by research and educational institutions.
Why develop an entirely new process? The reason is that Aurora Labs is pursuing an entirely different market that requires a vastly different 3D printing process. Theyâre hoping to address the incredibly expensive problem of providing large-sized metal replacement parts for remote industrial operations, in such areas as mining or shipping.
Itâs a great concept, but to be properly economical theyâve set themselves a rather hard target: 3D printing at least 1,000kg of metal parts per day.
That statistic is significantly larger than anything on the market today and obviously requires an entirely new process to do so. Thatâs why they developed LFT.
This weekâs announcement deals with their first successful prints on a prototype âAlpha testâ device with the LFT technology. No, they did not hit 1,000kgâs of metal prints in a day. Thatâs to come later, as this stage is merely to demonstrate that the technology works at a lower scale.
The recent test showed they were able to successfully 3D print an object with the Alpha machineâs 200 x 200 x 200 mm build volume at the rate of 15.88kg per day, or 0.662kg/hour. Thatâs about 63X slower than their ultimate target, but itâs first step of many to come.
Aurora Labs explains:
âThis showcases an ability to execute complexity in printing and indicates that once the full sized Rapid Manufacturing Printer is fully built, the technologyâs ultimate target print speed of 1000kg/day is achievable through scaling, rather than further proving the fundamental technology.â
This video shows some of the printing process:
Itâs interesting to note some of the characteristics of the LFT process that we had not previously seen:
Itâs a powder-based process, like most other metal 3D printing processes
Lasers are used to fuse loose powder
A print plate is required, and likely support structures too, although none are seen in this particular print
There is no powder recoating process visible in the video
Recoating is the process of laying down a precisely flat layer of additional powder for the laser to build into the next object layer. Recoating is one of the slowing aspects of metal 3D printing: every layer must wait for fresh powder to be deposited.
A similar delay occurs in most resin 3D printers, as the newly fused layer must be slowly peeled off the bottom of the clear resin tank. This adds time to each layerâs processing. However, several companies have invented ingenious ways of eliminating or significantly reducing this effect, drastically speeding up their print process.
Iâm wondering if Aurora Labs has figured out a way to do something similar with metal 3D printing? Do they have some magic method to deploy fine metal powder that takes very little time? If so, that might explain their confidence in being able to 3D print metal at such high speeds.
We donât know. But Iâm sure Aurora Labs will eventually reveal more of their secrets. For now, they have hit a key milestone.
Via Aurora Labsï»ż
Aerosint and Aconity have proven out their work in multi-metal powder deposition 3D printing.