Arcam AB fka AMAVF

[charlie T colton]

Working FastEBM Prototype Under Test

Final Report Summary - FASTEBM (High Productivity Electron Beam Melting Additive Manufacturing Development for the Part Production Systems Market)

"The modelling and results were reviewed and agreed by the project partners. Results are encouraging and some comparison to experimental results has been carried out using high speed video of the process.

Further tests on the RF Plasma Gun identified that this technology, although offering very significant benefits to the EBM process, would not be ready to deliver a 10kW beam for this project within the schedule. Consequently, and in accordance with the risk register, a contingency plan was initiated to design a 10kW triode gun that could be readily integrated with the Arcam system. The 10kW electron gun was simulated, designed, built and tested at TWI on an experimental system. The gun was integrated with a 10kW high voltage power supply and a filament and bias power supply – all operating at 60kV. During the tests the gun peaking curve was plotted over a range of cathode heating. Also the beam diameter was measured at a working distance representative of that used in the EBM process. These tests showed that the gun was performing as predicted by the computer simulations, and that over most of the beam power range the beam generated was compliant with the project objective i.e. to produce a beam of full width at half maximum (FWHM) of less than 200 microns.

The gun and power supply were then transferred from TWI to Arcam, where they were integrated with an EBM system to allow the gun to be tested using Arcam’s standard procedures, albeit at beam powers of 10kW rather than 3kW. Tests on this system allowed gun peaking curves of up to 10kW to be plotted. Beam melt tracks were made and measured to give an indication of the beam width. The beam width was measured with a beam probe device mounted in the EBM chamber.

3D parts have been manufactured by the prototype FastEBM system to allow comparison with present equipment.


The 3D model of the process has been refined and has been used to investigate the best processing parameters particularly at high beam powers. The process window – defined by examining the process line energy vs the electron beam scan energy – has been explored in the simulation for the higher velocities that will be used at higher beam powers.

The modelling and results were reviewed and agreed by the project partners. Results have been compared to experimental results in the UEN Arcam EBM machine.

Costing of the process has been developed within a production model to allow the cost of parts made with the system to be estimated."




Additional PROJECT FINAL REPORT - FIGURES
http://cordis.europa.eu/docs/results/286/286695/final1-final-report-fastebm-figures.pdf