7 ms·

Tungsten for radiation shielding use

52 points by noyesno 4y ago

litiholofan 4y ago
Neat. If I was in dentistry or oncology I'd print a tungsten apron like a suit of armour for kids, or perhaps a nice comfy/adjustable thyroid collar which isn't too tight or tall. With filament at $230 a kilo it might not be economically feasible but it sure would look cool.
- rdl 4y ago
  Perhaps 3d-printed tungsten filament chainmail?
fnordpiglet 4y ago
I printed a hat. Works great for the silent radio waves that the government uses to control your mind.
- manual89 4y ago
  Good neck workout too.
- toast0 4y ago
  Don't let this troll fool you. Tin-foil hats only work when they're made of tin; not tungsten, not aluminium or aluminum, only tin.
  - RobotToaster 4y ago
    They also need to be grounded, if they're only in contact with you they're an antenna.
    - fnordpiglet 4y ago
      Foiled again!
userbinator 4y ago
In other words: you need less tungsten than lead to get similar shielding results. But the tungsten costs many times more, and is also much harder unlike lead which is soft and easily worked, which is why radiation shielding is still overwhelmingly made of lead. In applications where its toxicity is a problem, it's used encapsulated inside another inert material.
- theelous3 4y ago
  Sure, if you want to shield a wall or container or something you will just slap lead on it, but this could be used for complex shielding of sensitive components in nuclear machinery and devices. Machining hard materials is extremely expensive and difficult (exotic material cutters or edm, with slow high precision grinding).
  - kragen 4y ago
    lead isn't a hard material, and if you need a hard material, this filament isn't what you're looking for either; it will be almost as fragile as pure petg
    - theelous3 4y ago
      I didn't say it was hard. I said machining tungsten is hard. Machining lead is also difficult and weird and the end result can be barely usable for anything, especially in hot environments or with any load. It's just not good. If you need complex parts, this could be an excellent choice. Idk what the confusion here is. Maybe you are unfamiliar with machining?
      - proto_lambda 4y ago
        The first sentence of your comment was structured like this: [reason to use lead], but [reason to use tungsten]. At least I expected the second sentence to expand on the pros of tungsten, when in fact it was about the pros of lead; interpreting it as the former would mean lead is a hard material.
picture 4y ago
Interesting! I'm designing the flight computer/electronics of a 2U cubesat for academia, and something like this might work really well for our application. We were considering borated polyethylene but the cost for that is prohibitive. This is perhaps not as efficient in terms of mass-to-protection ratio, but we have plenty more room in our mass budget instead of actual budget. I also like the idea that we may be able to mold this material around particularly sensitive elements of our system like the memory devices, to which neutrons are the biggest hazard.
- defrost 4y ago
  Academia? Cubesat projects? Maybe get the kids to look into using Magnetorquers to get some spin on and half shield with this product .. and you now have a platform for directional gamma ray detection | mapping. ( Gamma counts coming from "over there" will decrease whenever "over there" is masked by the partial shielding ) There are other apps, but that one springs to mind.
  - picture 4y ago
    Great idea! We do have 3 DoF magnetorquers on board, but I feel like the difference between shield on and shield off might need a very sensitive and directional detector..
    - defrost 4y ago
      It's a timing thing - Australia used a "we built it ourselves" detector with shielding that rotated about the crystal pack to find that missing mining source that hit the news last month. The detector part (doped crystals + scintillation sensors) is fundamentally undirectional - those pesky gamma come in from any direction. One side has to be shielded to bias the reading (use Tungsten perhaps) .. and by rotating the entire satellite the shielding direction changes - you now have a bulk data stats analysis challenge, do particular orientations align with counts (at various energy levels) rising or falling. As alway, have a fiddle with a ground based setup first.
kragen 4y ago
this sounds more entertaining for 3-d printing things that startle people by being staggeringly heavy rather than things that are actually useful it should be heavier than lead; lead is only 11.3 g/cc, tungsten is 19.3, 75% tungsten would be 14.5, but then the other 25% is petg with sp.gr. ≈ 1 so you should actually get a density of 14.7 but i struggle to imagine cases where using tungsten is a more cost-effective option than using lead and making the object 9% bigger? they cite 'various medical applications' but tungsten isn't exactly ideal for permanent body contact either oh actually they say it's 75% tungsten by mass, not volume, so it's only 4 g/cc, and so its attenuation (at 140keV) is only 18% of lead's (by volume) copper might be an alternative that is less toxic than lead and less expensive than tungsten
- hakfoo 4y ago
  I'd think the public palatability of lead products is one aspect. People don't worry as much about tungsten. I was thinking weights to fit specific items. Model railway wagons, for example, need to be weighted and balanced to operate smoothly, but you have significant size constraints. I threw a bunch of tungsten weights inside a small locomotive to give it extra tractive effort.
  - kragen 4y ago
    yeah but it turns out this is only 4 g/cc
- scythe 4y ago
  If it's only 75% tungsten, I'm figuring it's a tungsten powder. I work with lead all the time but I would not fuck with lead dust. Lead sulfide would be much safer, although studies feeding it to rats did show elevated lead levels. That said, no metal dust is very nice. Solid lead might be safer than tungsten powder. Maybe you could make an iodinated polymer or use a barium cement.
  - kragen 4y ago
    my candidate list of high-density fillers from dernocua (sorry for markdown) is - Osmium: [US$13000/kg][8], 22.65 g/cc, or possibly iridium at more than twice that price - Tungsten: [US$30/kg][9], 19.3 g/cc - Tungsten carbide? Not sure what it costs but its density is 15.6 g/cc. - Lead scrap: 95¢/kg, 11.3 g/cc - Steel scrap: [21¢/kg][10], 7.9 g/cc - Magnetite: [10¢/kg][11] [or so][12], 5.2 g/cc - Quartz (as construction sand): 3¢/kg, 2.6 g/cc - Water: [.06¢/kg][22] or so, 1 g/cc [8]: https://www.metalary.com/osmium-price/ https://www.metalary.com/osmium-price/ [9]: https://www.metalary.com/tungsten-price/ https://www.metalary.com/tungsten-price/ [10]: https://www.usgs.gov/centers/nmic/iron-and-steel-scrap-statistics-and-information https://www.usgs.gov/centers/nmic/iron-and-steel-scrap-stati... [11]: https://www.usgs.gov/centers/nmic/iron-ore-statistics-and-information https://www.usgs.gov/centers/nmic/iron-ore-statistics-and-in... [12]: https://stockhead.com.au/resources/barry-fitzgerald-why-magnetite-is-hot-and-whos-making-it/ https://stockhead.com.au/resources/barry-fitzgerald-why-magn... [22]: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/israel-proves-the-desalination-era-is-here/ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/israel-proves-the-... this is my approximation of the pareto frontier; that is, each of the items on the list is conjectured to be cheaper than everything that's denser than it is, and denser than everything that's cheaper. corrections are welcome i was thinking baryta (46¢/kg, 4.48 g/cc), mercury, litharge, minium, cinnabar, cupric oxide (US$3.90/kg, 6.315 g/cc), zinc oxide (US$29/kg, 5.6 g/cc), and manganese dioxide (5.026 g/cc) might be interesting in this context too i hadn't thought of your suggestion of galena (just cinnabar) and generally i'm skeptical of metal sulfides because of their tendency to produce hydrogen sulfide; i don't think that's an issue with those two. litharge, minium, and mercury are a lot more worrisome toxicologically i don't have solid pricing information for mercury, litharge, minium, cinnabar, or galena, and i'd be interested tungsten is probably more chemically inert for medical purposes than a lot of these
rdl 4y ago
Might be interesting to print grip modules for firearms (Sig does the "TXG" series which are tungsten-infused polymer, used for adding mass within the defined shape/volume for competitive shooting/recoil reduction reasons. Due to the design of the firearm, the grip module is just an accessory and not a firearm and thus not regulated, at least under US law. Being able to print custom shapes would be cool. (https://www.sigsauer.com/p320-x-series-txg-grip-module-assembly.html https://www.sigsauer.com/p320-x-series-txg-grip-module-assem...)
- londons_explore 4y ago
  The density is only 4 g/cm³. You'd likely do better just machining it out of steel (5g/cm³, and much cheaper)
  - rdl 4y ago
    The 3D printers which can do metal (metal forge, etc) are incredibly expensive (100k+). I was thinking about custom to hand 3D printed grip modules, qty 1. Machining a grip module out of metal requires tools and skills beyond 3D printing, too. There are also some slight performance advantages of a polymer frame (grip module, in this case) over a metal frame.
londons_explore 4y ago
75% by weight sounds like a lot of tungsten... But it is only 15% by volume... So to the casual observer, this material is mostly plastic.
- kristianp 4y ago
  Ah, that explains why its radiation blocking is so much worse tham pure tungsten!
  - londons_explore 4y ago
    If you could manufacture Tungsten powder with spherical particles (rather than sharp pointed particles), I bet they could have far more tungsten in there and still have it 3d print effectively. Perhaps up to 50% by volume (95% by weight)
    - iancmceachern 4y ago
      You can get that. https://micronmetals.com/product/tungsten-carbide-powder-spherical/ https://micronmetals.com/product/tungsten-carbide-powder-sph...
- francisduvivier 4y ago
  But its more than 3 times as dense as PETG still. 1kg of PETG makes is 300+ meter of filament, while 1kg of this stuff is only 100 meter. So I think the casual observer would notice that. But also means with thar price per KG.
ar9av 4y ago
Tungsten has the highest melting point of any pure metal, I believe, as well as being close to the highest atomic number among the non-radioactive metals. It's also reasonably workable as a material, isn't terribly toxic, and has a reasonable availability and price. The other high-melting metals near it in the periodic table all fall down on one or more of those properties. Osmium, for instance, is rather expensive, mined in only very small quantities, and reacts with air to form highly-toxic osmium tetroxide.
- azalemeth 4y ago
  I think it's worth highlighting just how horribly toxic osmium tetroxide is -- it's used as a stain for electron microscopy as it is dense and binds irreversibly to lipid membranes. Quoting from Wikipedia: > In the staining of the plasma membrane, osmium(VIII) oxide binds phospholipid head regions, thus creating contrast with the neighbouring protoplasm (cytoplasm). Additionally, osmium(VIII) oxide is also used for fixing biological samples in conjunction with HgCl2. Its rapid killing abilities are used to quickly kill live specimens such as protozoa. OsO4 stabilizes many proteins by transforming them into gels without destroying structural features. Tissue proteins that are stabilized by OsO4 are not coagulated by alcohols during dehydration. > OsO4 will irreversibly stain the human cornea, which can lead to blindness. The permissible exposure limit for osmium(VIII) oxide (8 hour time-weighted average) is 2 µg/m3. Osmium(VIII) oxide can penetrate plastics and food packaging, and therefore must be stored in glass under refrigeration.
  - admash 4y ago
    Worse, osmium tetroxide is volatile and sublimes at room temperature. I was told by my lab instructor that it is said to smell sweet, but that if you ever inhale enough to be able to smell it, you will have already absorbed a lethal dose.
    - kragen 4y ago
      lots of historical chemists smelled osmium and survived; that's how it got its name
sniperjoe360 4y ago
This material has radiation shielding properties far worse than just lead - lead which is cheaper and easier to manufacture Pure tungsten on the other hand is very good and can even shield beta particles
- iancmceachern 4y ago
  Yeah but it's lead! Lead isn't a very friendly thing to just have around.
  - kragen 4y ago
    paint it, sheesh
    - iancmceachern 4y ago
      Yeah, but you'll never pass RoHS, try shipping a product that doesn't meet RoHS...
      - kragen 4y ago
        are you saying this filament is nothing more than a meaningless exercise in box-checking bureaucracy that is depressing
        iancmceachern 4y ago
        No, im saying lead is bad and you can't put it in products anymore. Tungsten is ok
        kragen 4y ago
        lead metal is safer than tungsten to have in your body https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29300000/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29300000/ don't confuse government power with wisdom; in many ways they are opposites
RobotToaster 4y ago
Note that it's 75% by weight, not volume, which is about 15% by volume. A little disappointing.
- elromulous 4y ago
  Kind of makes sense though. Tungsten is quite dense. It can probably get prohibitively expensive pretty fast. Not to mention difficult to flow the material / keep hot the more tungsten you add.
jokoon 4y ago
I bought a 1kg tungsten cube
- noisy_boy 4y ago
  Top-quality paperweight.
Prcmaker 4y ago
That is actually so useful for me, wow. We prototype in lead, which is a pain from an OHS perspective. This would make life a lot eaiser, without the cost of tooling to get moulding nylon/tungsten parts made.
perihelions 4y ago
- "The calculated HVL for Prusament PETG Tungsten 75% is 1.402 mm (orange mark). For comparison, the HVL for pure lead is 0.256 mm, HVL for pure tungsten is 0.191 mm." Err, they make it sound like ordinary lead is the best choice? The article's point is that additive manufacturing is a workaround for tungsten's difficult material working properties. But: lead foil, you can simply bend it with your hands, into any shape you want. And apparently it's much thinner.

52 points by noyesno 4y ago

Neat. If I was in dentistry or oncology I'd print a tungsten apron like a suit of armour for kids, or perhaps a nice comfy/adjustable thyroid collar which isn't too tight or tall. With filament at $230 a kilo it might not be economically feasible but it sure would look cool.

rdl 4y ago
Perhaps 3d-printed tungsten filament chainmail?

fnordpiglet 4y ago

I printed a hat. Works great for the silent radio waves that the government uses to control your mind.

manual89 4y ago
Good neck workout too.
toast0 4y ago
Don't let this troll fool you. Tin-foil hats only work when they're made of tin; not tungsten, not aluminium or aluminum, only tin.
- RobotToaster 4y ago
  They also need to be grounded, if they're only in contact with you they're an antenna.
  - fnordpiglet 4y ago
    Foiled again!

userbinator 4y ago

In other words: you need less tungsten than lead to get similar shielding results. But the tungsten costs many times more, and is also much harder unlike lead which is soft and easily worked, which is why radiation shielding is still overwhelmingly made of lead. In applications where its toxicity is a problem, it's used encapsulated inside another inert material.

theelous3 4y ago
Sure, if you want to shield a wall or container or something you will just slap lead on it, but this could be used for complex shielding of sensitive components in nuclear machinery and devices. Machining hard materials is extremely expensive and difficult (exotic material cutters or edm, with slow high precision grinding).
- kragen 4y ago
  lead isn't a hard material, and if you need a hard material, this filament isn't what you're looking for either; it will be almost as fragile as pure petg
  - theelous3 4y ago
    I didn't say it was hard. I said machining tungsten is hard. Machining lead is also difficult and weird and the end result can be barely usable for anything, especially in hot environments or with any load. It's just not good. If you need complex parts, this could be an excellent choice. Idk what the confusion here is. Maybe you are unfamiliar with machining?
    - proto_lambda 4y ago
      The first sentence of your comment was structured like this: [reason to use lead], but [reason to use tungsten]. At least I expected the second sentence to expand on the pros of tungsten, when in fact it was about the pros of lead; interpreting it as the former would mean lead is a hard material.

picture 4y ago

Interesting! I'm designing the flight computer/electronics of a 2U cubesat for academia, and something like this might work really well for our application. We were considering borated polyethylene but the cost for that is prohibitive. This is perhaps not as efficient in terms of mass-to-protection ratio, but we have plenty more room in our mass budget instead of actual budget. I also like the idea that we may be able to mold this material around particularly sensitive elements of our system like the memory devices, to which neutrons are the biggest hazard.

defrost 4y ago
Academia? Cubesat projects? Maybe get the kids to look into using Magnetorquers to get some spin on and half shield with this product .. and you now have a platform for directional gamma ray detection | mapping. ( Gamma counts coming from "over there" will decrease whenever "over there" is masked by the partial shielding ) There are other apps, but that one springs to mind.
- picture 4y ago
  Great idea! We do have 3 DoF magnetorquers on board, but I feel like the difference between shield on and shield off might need a very sensitive and directional detector..
  - defrost 4y ago
    It's a timing thing - Australia used a "we built it ourselves" detector with shielding that rotated about the crystal pack to find that missing mining source that hit the news last month. The detector part (doped crystals + scintillation sensors) is fundamentally undirectional - those pesky gamma come in from any direction. One side has to be shielded to bias the reading (use Tungsten perhaps) .. and by rotating the entire satellite the shielding direction changes - you now have a bulk data stats analysis challenge, do particular orientations align with counts (at various energy levels) rising or falling. As alway, have a fiddle with a ground based setup first.

kragen 4y ago

this sounds more entertaining for 3-d printing things that startle people by being staggeringly heavy rather than things that are actually useful it should be heavier than lead; lead is only 11.3 g/cc, tungsten is 19.3, 75% tungsten would be 14.5, but then the other 25% is petg with sp.gr. ≈ 1 so you should actually get a density of 14.7 but i struggle to imagine cases where using tungsten is a more cost-effective option than using lead and making the object 9% bigger? they cite 'various medical applications' but tungsten isn't exactly ideal for permanent body contact either oh actually they say it's 75% tungsten by mass, not volume, so it's only 4 g/cc, and so its attenuation (at 140keV) is only 18% of lead's (by volume) copper might be an alternative that is less toxic than lead and less expensive than tungsten

hakfoo 4y ago
I'd think the public palatability of lead products is one aspect. People don't worry as much about tungsten. I was thinking weights to fit specific items. Model railway wagons, for example, need to be weighted and balanced to operate smoothly, but you have significant size constraints. I threw a bunch of tungsten weights inside a small locomotive to give it extra tractive effort.
- kragen 4y ago
  yeah but it turns out this is only 4 g/cc
scythe 4y ago
If it's only 75% tungsten, I'm figuring it's a tungsten powder. I work with lead all the time but I would not fuck with lead dust. Lead sulfide would be much safer, although studies feeding it to rats did show elevated lead levels. That said, no metal dust is very nice. Solid lead might be safer than tungsten powder. Maybe you could make an iodinated polymer or use a barium cement.
- kragen 4y ago
  my candidate list of high-density fillers from dernocua (sorry for markdown) is - Osmium: [US$13000/kg][8], 22.65 g/cc, or possibly iridium at more than twice that price - Tungsten: [US$30/kg][9], 19.3 g/cc - Tungsten carbide? Not sure what it costs but its density is 15.6 g/cc. - Lead scrap: 95¢/kg, 11.3 g/cc - Steel scrap: [21¢/kg][10], 7.9 g/cc - Magnetite: [10¢/kg][11] [or so][12], 5.2 g/cc - Quartz (as construction sand): 3¢/kg, 2.6 g/cc - Water: [.06¢/kg][22] or so, 1 g/cc [8]: https://www.metalary.com/osmium-price/ https://www.metalary.com/osmium-price/ [9]: https://www.metalary.com/tungsten-price/ https://www.metalary.com/tungsten-price/ [10]: https://www.usgs.gov/centers/nmic/iron-and-steel-scrap-statistics-and-information https://www.usgs.gov/centers/nmic/iron-and-steel-scrap-stati... [11]: https://www.usgs.gov/centers/nmic/iron-ore-statistics-and-information https://www.usgs.gov/centers/nmic/iron-ore-statistics-and-in... [12]: https://stockhead.com.au/resources/barry-fitzgerald-why-magnetite-is-hot-and-whos-making-it/ https://stockhead.com.au/resources/barry-fitzgerald-why-magn... [22]: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/israel-proves-the-desalination-era-is-here/ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/israel-proves-the-... this is my approximation of the pareto frontier; that is, each of the items on the list is conjectured to be cheaper than everything that's denser than it is, and denser than everything that's cheaper. corrections are welcome i was thinking baryta (46¢/kg, 4.48 g/cc), mercury, litharge, minium, cinnabar, cupric oxide (US$3.90/kg, 6.315 g/cc), zinc oxide (US$29/kg, 5.6 g/cc), and manganese dioxide (5.026 g/cc) might be interesting in this context too i hadn't thought of your suggestion of galena (just cinnabar) and generally i'm skeptical of metal sulfides because of their tendency to produce hydrogen sulfide; i don't think that's an issue with those two. litharge, minium, and mercury are a lot more worrisome toxicologically i don't have solid pricing information for mercury, litharge, minium, cinnabar, or galena, and i'd be interested tungsten is probably more chemically inert for medical purposes than a lot of these

rdl 4y ago

Might be interesting to print grip modules for firearms (Sig does the "TXG" series which are tungsten-infused polymer, used for adding mass within the defined shape/volume for competitive shooting/recoil reduction reasons. Due to the design of the firearm, the grip module is just an accessory and not a firearm and thus not regulated, at least under US law. Being able to print custom shapes would be cool. (https://www.sigsauer.com/p320-x-series-txg-grip-module-assembly.html https://www.sigsauer.com/p320-x-series-txg-grip-module-assem...)

londons_explore 4y ago
The density is only 4 g/cm³. You'd likely do better just machining it out of steel (5g/cm³, and much cheaper)
- rdl 4y ago
  The 3D printers which can do metal (metal forge, etc) are incredibly expensive (100k+). I was thinking about custom to hand 3D printed grip modules, qty 1. Machining a grip module out of metal requires tools and skills beyond 3D printing, too. There are also some slight performance advantages of a polymer frame (grip module, in this case) over a metal frame.

londons_explore 4y ago

75% by weight sounds like a lot of tungsten... But it is only 15% by volume... So to the casual observer, this material is mostly plastic.

kristianp 4y ago
Ah, that explains why its radiation blocking is so much worse tham pure tungsten!
- londons_explore 4y ago
  If you could manufacture Tungsten powder with spherical particles (rather than sharp pointed particles), I bet they could have far more tungsten in there and still have it 3d print effectively. Perhaps up to 50% by volume (95% by weight)
  - iancmceachern 4y ago
    You can get that. https://micronmetals.com/product/tungsten-carbide-powder-spherical/ https://micronmetals.com/product/tungsten-carbide-powder-sph...
francisduvivier 4y ago
But its more than 3 times as dense as PETG still. 1kg of PETG makes is 300+ meter of filament, while 1kg of this stuff is only 100 meter. So I think the casual observer would notice that. But also means with thar price per KG.

ar9av 4y ago

Tungsten has the highest melting point of any pure metal, I believe, as well as being close to the highest atomic number among the non-radioactive metals. It's also reasonably workable as a material, isn't terribly toxic, and has a reasonable availability and price. The other high-melting metals near it in the periodic table all fall down on one or more of those properties. Osmium, for instance, is rather expensive, mined in only very small quantities, and reacts with air to form highly-toxic osmium tetroxide.

azalemeth 4y ago
I think it's worth highlighting just how horribly toxic osmium tetroxide is -- it's used as a stain for electron microscopy as it is dense and binds irreversibly to lipid membranes. Quoting from Wikipedia: > In the staining of the plasma membrane, osmium(VIII) oxide binds phospholipid head regions, thus creating contrast with the neighbouring protoplasm (cytoplasm). Additionally, osmium(VIII) oxide is also used for fixing biological samples in conjunction with HgCl2. Its rapid killing abilities are used to quickly kill live specimens such as protozoa. OsO4 stabilizes many proteins by transforming them into gels without destroying structural features. Tissue proteins that are stabilized by OsO4 are not coagulated by alcohols during dehydration. > OsO4 will irreversibly stain the human cornea, which can lead to blindness. The permissible exposure limit for osmium(VIII) oxide (8 hour time-weighted average) is 2 µg/m3. Osmium(VIII) oxide can penetrate plastics and food packaging, and therefore must be stored in glass under refrigeration.
- admash 4y ago
  Worse, osmium tetroxide is volatile and sublimes at room temperature. I was told by my lab instructor that it is said to smell sweet, but that if you ever inhale enough to be able to smell it, you will have already absorbed a lethal dose.
  - kragen 4y ago
    lots of historical chemists smelled osmium and survived; that's how it got its name

sniperjoe360 4y ago

This material has radiation shielding properties far worse than just lead - lead which is cheaper and easier to manufacture Pure tungsten on the other hand is very good and can even shield beta particles

iancmceachern 4y ago
Yeah but it's lead! Lead isn't a very friendly thing to just have around.
- kragen 4y ago
  paint it, sheesh
  - iancmceachern 4y ago
    Yeah, but you'll never pass RoHS, try shipping a product that doesn't meet RoHS...
    - kragen 4y ago
      are you saying this filament is nothing more than a meaningless exercise in box-checking bureaucracy that is depressing
      - iancmceachern 4y ago
        No, im saying lead is bad and you can't put it in products anymore. Tungsten is ok
        kragen 4y ago
        lead metal is safer than tungsten to have in your body https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29300000/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29300000/ don't confuse government power with wisdom; in many ways they are opposites

RobotToaster 4y ago

Note that it's 75% by weight, not volume, which is about 15% by volume. A little disappointing.

elromulous 4y ago
Kind of makes sense though. Tungsten is quite dense. It can probably get prohibitively expensive pretty fast. Not to mention difficult to flow the material / keep hot the more tungsten you add.

jokoon 4y ago

I bought a 1kg tungsten cube

noisy_boy 4y ago
Top-quality paperweight.

Prcmaker 4y ago

That is actually so useful for me, wow. We prototype in lead, which is a pain from an OHS perspective. This would make life a lot eaiser, without the cost of tooling to get moulding nylon/tungsten parts made.

perihelions 4y ago

- "The calculated HVL for Prusament PETG Tungsten 75% is 1.402 mm (orange mark). For comparison, the HVL for pure lead is 0.256 mm, HVL for pure tungsten is 0.191 mm." Err, they make it sound like ordinary lead is the best choice? The article's point is that additive manufacturing is a workaround for tungsten's difficult material working properties. But: lead foil, you can simply bend it with your hands, into any shape you want. And apparently it's much thinner.