The Material Science of Metal 3D Printing

I do not have enough time to make a teamtrees video for Real Engineering, but we did make a video about methods to conserve rainforest habitats over on Real Science. I planted 1000 trees yesterday over on teamtrees.org/. Every tree gets us closer to our 20 million target. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mV6GL7RrXz8&t=1s

As a welder and steel fabricator... I have seen plenty of young engineers bringin forth plans that are impossible or REALLY UNNECESSARILY COMPLEX to fabricate. (And many of them have refused to take feedback... for some reason.) And since I started to study engineering at university, I have found great amount of value from my practical experience of welding and steel fabrication. Seriously engineers... Talk to the people making your things. Often there are simple changes you can do that will cut cost and production time, if you'd just bother to talk to us. We don't bite. We might be blunt and few worded, but we aren't mean. We like it when we get to share our experience.

I'm a materials science and engineering major and after I saw this video I decided to dedicate my research to metal additive manufacturing. I've since studied recycling Ti64 powders and post processing that improves fatigue. I'm currently taking a machine learning course that's specifically for materials science data analysis. Thank you for basically setting up my early career!

“Placing fastener holes in inaccessible locations” Seems to be a specialty of engineers.

The best part of this channel is that I’m slowly understanding more and more of what he’s talking about as I’m studying engineering in college

5:56 I love those two Y axises

You wouldn't download a car 20 years later:

While you stated that pores and cracks mostly form during overhangs, with no support material below, I must mention that with the right parameters of laserspeed (Scanspeed) and laserpower (in watts or Joules per mm³) you usually achive parts with 99.5+ % relative density. What is often even better than casting parts. When we did a parameter study of AlSi10Mg we found that the tensile strenght exceeds 400N/mm² (as build with no heat treatment) for casted parts its only around 250 N/mm²´but unfortunately the elongation before breaking is almost zero so you get a very brittle part. The issue here is, that you need a well formed crystaline structure to accomondate fatigue fracturing, so heat treatment is necessarry. But, heat treatment means deformation of your printed part... So what we need is a simulation tool to predict the deformation after 3D-Printing and after heat treatment. Even thou ANSYS has its Additive manufacturing suit, we found the results not to correlate well enought with real world experiments to be of use for regular implementation.

Lasers that weld on the atomic level is the future of 3d printing.

I’m a mechanical engineering student and this semester I’m taking a class called materials and processes, the crazy thing is that just last week we did a lab on this topic of how we can affect metals to improve mechanical properties. We had to put a sample of carbon steel in a furnace and while we were waiting our lab instructor was telling us about the research he did in 3D printing while he was a student and he essentially gave a more generic version of what your said with the fatigue analysis. I just find it so cool that you made a video on this right after I just learned about this in lab.

I have been an engineer for over 25 years after college and i feel that it was an amazing career choice. I can honestly say that generally speaking i had more good days at work than bad ones by far. Actually often having quite a bit of fun designing and building and testing things, breaking things, blowing things up, etc...

You can hear how he relates when he said "mecanist laugh at the designs of a confident college kid"

Real Engineering: 3d printing metal Youtube: #TeamTrees

I've always been worried that these videos only sounded right to me because I wasn't professionally familiar with the topics being discussed, but as someone who works with all the technologies mentioned here everyday, I can say you nailed it! Excellent work, the service you offer to your audience and to engineers everywhere is priceless.

Retired University professor, this wonderful field of science definitely requires more funding!! The applications and advantages are indeed infinit.

You can melt the powder by electron beams instead of laser. Main advantages are more efficient melting since the kinetic energy of the electrons hitting the powder particles are more efficient than lasers since the laser is dependant of reflectivity of said powder. Also with electron beam melting you have much better control of the energy source, with lasers any movement is restricted by mechanical movement of glass that reflects the laser in a coordinate system, electron beam is instead controlled by magnetic coils which can be manipulated orders of magnitude faster since you dont depend on mechinal movement of parts. But the two different methods complement each other☺️

Literally learning these exact concepts in my senior Detail Design course for my aerospace engineering degree at ERAU. Great video! Love the visuals.

5:59 Revolutionary coordinate system confirmed lol

I always considered 3d printing as an alternative to casting. I've done a lot of work for oil and gas (machining extremely low volume cast impellers mostly), and the sheer number of jobs that had top go back for welding due to porosity or were scrapped outright because porosity appeared on finishing cuts is phenomenal. Add to that the setup cost of producing the patterns for casting i think 3d printing is a very viable alternative. I'd regularly get jobs where unimportant faces and diameters (the shrouds, o/d and the hub face used for the sprue) were cast with 20mm, 50mm and 150mm of metal on them (respectively) for absolutely no reason. being able to print the part leaving 1mm on the tolerance'd diameters and faces would have been a godsend. The money doesn't stop being saved there - the parts would require minimal balancing and fettling after machining.. I can't believe no one has jumped on this area.

I have a suggestion, to increase productivity. A large head with lot of nozzles with valves may be designed, valves may operate electronically, there by a lot of material may be deposited simultaneously, increasing amount of material deposited per unit time.