Abstract
The propensity to manufacture functional and geometrically sophisticated parts from a wide range of metals provides the metal additive manufacturing (AM) processes superior advantages over traditional methods. The field of metal AM is currently dominated by beam-based technologies such as selective laser sintering (SLM) or electron beam melting (EBM) which have some limitations such as high production cost, residual stress and anisotropic mechanical properties induced by melting of metal powders followed by rapid solidification. So, there exist a significant gap between industrial production requirements and the qualities offered by well-established beam-based AM technologies. Therefore, beamless metal AM techniques (known as non-beam metal AM) have gained increasing attention in recent years as they have been found to be able to fill the gap and bring new possibilities. There exist a number of beamless processes with distinctively various characteristics that are either under development or already available on the market. Since this is a very promising field and there is currently no high-quality review on this topic yet, this paper aims to review the key beamless processes and their latest developments.
Highlights
There has been a trend in metal additive manufacturing (AM) in recent years and much of the reports on AM are about the growth in metal-AM and its significant impact on design and rapid manufacture of geometrically complicated high-end parts
Scalable process, high accuracy and smooth surface finish (Ra of ~6 μm), high printing speed (0.8–1.5 kg/hr depending on material and layer thickness), lower residual stress than beam-based systems, highly complex 3D shapes and assemblies can be printed without support, relatively low printing cost, suitable for serial production of small parts
A tissue staple was used as a benchmark sample and printed using Digital Metal® (Höganäs, Sweden) Binder jetting (BJ) technology at two different sizes to be compared with SLM and Electrochemical fabrication (EFAB) technology
Summary
There has been a trend in metal additive manufacturing (AM) in recent years and much of the reports on AM are about the growth in metal-AM and its significant impact on design and rapid manufacture of geometrically complicated high-end parts. There exist a number beamless metal-AM systems are energy inefficient, and suffer from the high costs of technology and available operations processes with various distinct characteristics that are either under development or already as in well constraints speed, precision surface quality. Liquid metal jetting (a type of material jetting technology), wire and arc AM (WAAM), and shape deposition manufacturing (SDM) approaches are based on material melting, similar to beam-based techniques They use energy sources other than laser or electron beam for melting of materials. AM (UAM), additive friction stir deposition (AFSD), friction stir AM (FSAM), and cold spray AM (CSAM) processes use solid state thermo-mechanical bonding without the need for a protective print environment for printing mega scale parts which are not viable through beam-based systems [9]. Wohlers Report 2018 [1] and various internet sources have been used to analyse the market situation and future industrial trends in metal AM
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