SBIR Phase I: Metal Nanocomposites designed for Low Power Sintering for use in Additive Manufacturing

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is to enable a broad range of industries to quickly and relatively inexpensively create custom metal components. What before would have been impossible to do with traditional CNC machining, or cost-prohibitive to do with traditional direct metal laser sintering additive manufacturing, can now be accomplished with low cost equipment. This will allow businesses ranging from medical, to aerospace, to automotive to rapidly iterate on their designs and increase the pace of new developments. The impact on our society is difficult to predict, just as the impact of the Internet was also grossly underestimated with the way that it has now become part of our everyday lives. The innovation itself is to greatly lower the cost of creating custom metal parts, thus enabling a wide variety of other industries to flourish. This project intends to create a new type of metal composite that works with low cost additive manufacturing equipment by finding new ways to direct energy into fusing the metal particles together. The innovation is in the choice of materials that enables the ease of processing. The anticipated technical results are the creation of proof of concept sample parts and a determination of their mechanical strength as compared to other more traditional methods of manufacturing. Often individuals with an idea for a new product or business are held back by the high cost of prototyping that limits it to only the largest, most established companies. The research addresses the current extremely high cost of using additive manufacturing to create custom metal parts.