Replies to post #2047 on Arcam AB fka AMAVF

[mauser96]

see also the pdf of that report with a very interesting graph not in the report itself


http://cordis.europa.eu/docs/results/286/286695/final1-final-report-fastebm-figures.pdf

[charlie T colton]

Anyone Want To Dig Deeper Into FastEBM?

Thank goodness this is mostly electronic and not paper...
Can you even imagine this kind of communication via snail mail?

Most of us have read the Final Report Summary - FASTEBM.

That was the SUMMARY. There are more details, if anyone's interested. Sadly, not much from Arcam yet.

The Result in Brief - Faster production of aircraft parts.

There is the updated CORDIS FastEBM Project Page.

There are a few links on the bottom of that page that should get you to:

Improving Hatching Strategies for Powder Bed Based Additive Manufacturing with an Electron Beam by 3D Simulations
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1403.3251v1.pdf

VALIDATION EXPERIMENTS FOR LBM SIMULATIONS OF ELECTRON BEAM MELTING
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1402.2440v1.pdf

The big news so far seems to be mostly about the new EB Gun manufactured by TWI Limited.

Warning! Most of the information from here on is dated. Relevant, but dated. The new gun design is based on this work, so for me, it's important.

Colin N. Ribton worked on "new approaches to electron gun optics" for the FastEBM and HiResEBM projects. Effective design of electron beam processing systems by trending

More recently Colin along with S del Pozo and D R Smith worked on the "Characterisation of a Novel Electron Beam Gun Design with a Radio Frequency Excited Plasma Cathode". The full report isn't free but a Industrial Member Report Summary – Key Findings for Industry is. The full report probably has the most recent information on the 10 kW gun.

I don't remember seeing who was working on the new beam deflection system but TWI has done work there. It's likely that they're part of the team working on it. There's a YouTube video on TWI Electron Beam Rapid Deflection. "The beam moves so fast that it may be timeshared between melt pools. Design and engineering of electron gun designs and equipment for beam generation, focusing and deflection are some of TWI's services." It sounds like multi-beam to me ;)

Here's a little bonus find - TWI Limited was part of the third CORDIS project using a high power EB gun. It was called RingMan. The goal there is for "higher power offshore wind turbines". The CORDIS Final Report Summary - RINGMAN (Offshore Wind Turbine Towers – A Quicker, Cheaper Flange Supply Route) detailed the effort for MUCH higher powered EB guns.

[investorhub123]

So based on a current build speed of .1 kg per hour an arc am system could produce about 520 kg per year assuming a 20 hour day (4 hr downtime/setup) and 5 days a week.
This would be about 1146 lbs worth of parts.