Low Cost, High Performance ECM Enabled by Additive Manufacturing

Electrochemical machining (ECM) is known for its high material removal rate, superior surface quality, non-contact processing, and the ability to operate on many challenging metal alloys. Despite these advantages, ECM remains a niche technique as design engineers are timid to make use of it given its associated price tag for initial tool development. Tool development cost, primarily driven by the design iteration process, can be lowered by a reduction in tool iterations and/or a reduction in iteration cost. The growing prevalence of metal 3D printing (AM) has the potential to achieve both of these ends. AM reduces traditional design-for-manufacturing barriers and lowers the cost of tool fabrication. The proposed Phase 1 effort will explore electrolyte flow concepts that are made more practical by AM technology and will use the improved methodology to produce a mock small-scale turbine vane geometry.