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I've been really interested for a while now in titanium, and while I think laser sintering is a really cool application, something caught my eye when trying to

I've been really interested for a while now in titanium, and while I think laser sintering is a really cool application, something caught my eye when trying to find videos about the material: some of the titanium-alloy hammers you can buy at the hardware store are made by molten metal casting in ceramic molds. For some reason it really fascinates me to see titanium being used that way, because it's not the way most places use it (it is a notoriously hard metal to work with). I wonder, are laser sintering and other techniques fundamentally slow or can they be improved to be more competitive? https://youtu.be/p1Vk2hMO0ME?t=83 https://youtu.be/p1Vk2hMO0ME?t=83

lylecheatham 6y ago
They are pretty fundamentally slow because of the constraints from the melt pool. Because you are trying to locally melt the material (lots of energy) and then immediately solidify it, you pretty much have to use a melt pool under a certain size and go under a certain speed to avoid making a total mess of the part. Also a significant amount of energy goes to waste as it gets dissipated by the material, and the powder feedstock is extremely expensive as it needs to be a certain size of round powder which is hard to manufacture.