Bengaluru Space Expo 2022

Our CMD, Apparao Mallavarappu along with with Eric Rouchouze, our CEO had the honour to meet President Emmanuel Macron and Olivier Becht on the occasion of the 5th edition of the “Choose France” summit. 14 foreign investment announcements were made yesterday, that confirmed the attractiveness of France to host structural projects at European level in new technologies and strategic sectors.

Space Expo

A laser-based technology in manufacturing that uses powdered metals can be termed metal 3D printing. A vast variety of materials are available in powdered form for metal 3D printing in India including titanium, steel, stainless steel, aluminium, copper, cobalt chrome, tungsten and nickel-based alloys. They are known as 3D printing metal powders. Precious metals like gold, platinum and silver are also attainable. They are now recognised as 3D printing precious metals. So metal powder is the backbone of metal 3D printing. It is difficult and dangerous to handle in its raw state yet very widely used because of its unique features.

Veer-O-Metals

As metal 3D printing technology uses powdered metals, the differences in metal 3D printing types are based on how they fuse the powder into metal parts. These methods vary considerably. It ranges from using high-energy lasers to fuse the loose powder to extruding bound metal powder filament. The most common type and widely used method is the powder bed fusion technique. In this method, machines distribute a fine layer of powder over a build plate and selectively melt a cross-section of the part into the powder layer. It is of two types: Selective Laser Melting and Electron Beam Melting. SLM machines use high-powered lasers to fuse metal layers into parts. EBM machines use an electron beam instead of a laser to fabricate parts. Then there is another method called Direct energy deposition that uses metal feedstock and a laser to fabricate parts. Another method is the EBAM technique where the Wire DED machines use a laser to melt feedstock, which is a metal wire instead of blown powder. There is the Binder Jetting method which is a large-scale, high-fidelity method of metal 3D printing. Bound Powder Extrusion (BPE) is the newest method of metal additive manufacturing. Here, the powder is bound together in waxy polymers which makes it much safer and easier to use than loose powder. Then there is the latest concept of FDM 3D metal printing which is Fused Deposition Modelling which is a plastic extrusion process. In addition to plastics, some FFF/FDM 3D printers are capable of printing metal filaments.