Scalable, Non-Traditional Additive Manufacturing printing of inexpensive metallic structures

Metal additive manufacturing (AM) is poising to revolutionize manufacturing, supply chains, and logistics, and 3DFlexible is developing a new low cost, easily scalable metal FDM technology to accelerate its adoption. As demonstrated in our Phase I work, there is no need for energy beam heating or processing chamber / shielding gases for this technology. Contrary to current metal powder bed technology, our metal AM process should also work for ceramics. The addition of nanoparticles to metallic paste presents a way to lower the sintering temperature. The proposed multiple dispensing nozzles for shells and infills of metallic structures offers an upscaling path to meet Army’s need to print large metallic structures while still preserving surface quality. Our platform based on commercial CNC mills simplifies the hardware and software transition to a larger build volume of 8+ cubic feet. The integration of the open-source 3D slicing toolbox, Slic3r, with the Haas CNC mill through industry-standard G-code and M-code plus metallic paste development, will achieve the ability to fabricate complex metallic structures with internal cavities and intentional voids. The feature of multiple materials/extruders will furnish an additional way to fabricate 3-dimensional multi-material parts for studying the joining of dissimilar materials.