Production cost cut by 50%
Breakthrough speeds and cost reductions in aluminum part production have been achieved using Equispheres’ aluminum powder. Aconity3D was able to reduce printing time by more than 60% when printing a complex equipment component with Equispheres’ Performance AlSi10Mg powder. The faster print time contributes to a 50% decrease in part cost.
The increased productivity is achieved by a holistic approach, optimizing material, machine, process and part design.
Industry Challenge
For most traditional aluminum powders, inconsistent material characteristics mean the material must be processed slowly on Selective Laser Melting printers to achieve reliable properties in the finished part. Manufacturers must compromise between build speed and part consistency.
Metal powders made using traditional atomization methods cannot deliver the consistency required for higher speed processing on modern, high-powered powder bed fusion equipment.
Equispheres’ monodisperse, uniform, spherical powder absorbs laser energy uniformly. This creates a stable melt pool that allows manufacturers to increase laser scan speed and hatch distance.
CAD model of the Aconity3D part
What was discovered
Aconity3D is a manufacturer of additive manufacturing printers. The company used Equispheres’ powder to print a complex scan head used in its line of printers, with the aim of producing the part more quickly and at a lower cost than is achievable with standard powder.
Aconity3D confirmed its part can be produced 3x faster using Equispheres’ high-performance powder with no impact on part functionality. Using the AconityTWO powder bed fusion machine, the company was able to reduce printing time from 53 hours with standard material to 17.5 hours.
Equispheres’ Precision line of aluminum powders solved one manufacturer’s problem with dimensional accuracy on thin-walled parts, while also boosting production speed and improving part consistency.
Summary of key results
Dimensional Accuracy
One important aspect to cooling components is to use heat conduction fins that are very thin to obtain a large surface area. The testing demonstrated Equispheres’ powder can produce thin-walled items that are more than 50% thinner and with 3 times the precision compared to those produced by a traditional powder on their AM machines. Shown in the tables below are the smallest fin diameters producible by this process at an acceptable level of accuracy (i.e., less than 15% deviation from target diameter) and the average deviation across all feature sizes respectively.| Equispheres’ powder | Powder from traditional supplier | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| .014 in. (0.36 mm) | .030 in. (0.76 mm) | ~50% thinner fins |
| .001 in. (0.025 mm) | .003 in. (0.076 mm) | 3x improvement in precision of the feature |
Consistency of Mechanical Properties
Engineers need to know that a printed part will exhibit consistent mechanical properties to have the statistical confidence to optimize the design for demanding applications. The coefficient of variation measures the relative variability of sets of data. In the table below, coefficient of variation indicates the spread of test values, which provides an insight into the repeatability of the measured properties. The smaller the variance, the less ‘scatter’ and the more reliable the process. With better consistency, engineers do not need to over-design a bulky part to allow for large variance and they can confidently design and produce lighter parts.
As shown in the table below, parts built with Equispheres powder showed much less variation in mechanical properties.
| Yield* (MPa) | Ultimate Tensile Strength* (MPa) | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Average Value | Equispheres | 186.5 | 293.7 |
| Traditional supplier | 182.0 | 290.2 | |
| Coefficient of Variation | Equispheres | 0.57% | 0.16% |
| Traditional supplier | 3.41% | 3.09% |
*After Stress Relief
