ECN Develops A DLP Metal Printing Technique

By on April 25th, 2014 in research

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Researchers at the Energy Research Center of the Netherlands (ECN) have developed a new technique for 3D printing that can create metal parts without melting its mineral material.

Using the research centerā€™s Digital Light Processing-based technology (DLP), which was originally created to build ceramic parts, researchers recently discovered that the same method can be used to manufacture high quality metal components.

While there are a number of metal printing technologies currently on the market, ECNā€™s DLP method is unique in its ability to fashion parts without the need of melting the machineā€™s base material. According to Dutch researchers, eliminating the metallic melt pool created by laser sintering machines enables the production of well-compacted, homogenous and high-grade materials that can be rendered into any geometry a designer can imagine.

Whatā€™s more, because DLP metal manufacturing skips the melting process, parts can be built faster with a guarantee that each layer of a component will be made of the same constituent material, be equally as dense and have the same conductive properties.

Read more at ENGINEERING.com