Objective
Electron beam melting additive manufacture is used to produce successive layers of a part in a powder bed and offers the ability to produce components closest to their final dimensions, with good surface finish. At this time the process is faster than any other technique of comparable quality, however the parts are not produced at sufficient rate to make them economically viable for any but very high value specific applications. It has been identified that airframe production requires a large number of brackets of many different designs (>1200 in an Airbus A380). These are currently machined from aluminium and titanium billet, plate or forgings with extremely high wastage of material, which in the case of titanium alloys is expensive and contains scarce elements such as vanadium.
The development and knowledge created and protected in this project will allow the SME collaborators to exploit the advantage gained through the development of vastly superior additive manufacturing (AM) production systems.
The key outputs to the project will be:
1. An innovative new high power electron beam gun that has been designed for the EBM process and that enables high productivity processing.
2. Knowledge surrounding the use of the high power electron beam gun, including the process control, and modelled and validated understanding of beam-powder bed interaction.
Fields of science
- natural scienceschemical sciencesinorganic chemistrytransition metals
- natural scienceschemical sciencesinorganic chemistrypost-transition metals
- social scienceseconomics and businesseconomicsproduction economicsproductivity
- engineering and technologymechanical engineeringmanufacturing engineeringadditive manufacturing
Topic(s)
Call for proposal
FP7-SME-2011
See other projects for this call
Funding Scheme
BSG-SME - Research for SMEsCoordinator
431 37 MOLNDAL
Sweden