I saw a video doing something like awhile ago [1], and I thought the idea of using electroplating made sense, but I know absolutely nothing about chemical engineering or material science.
It's interesting to see this idea in action, though with my limited experience with electroplating it seems like it'd be absurdly slow.
You're right - electroplating isn't traditionally very fast. Much of the system has been engineered to drive a build speed that's relevant for mass manufacturing while maintaining material properties (think 100-1000x faster than typical electroplating)
Very, very cool. If you can make metal 3D printing viable for consumers I'll be the first in line to buy one (though I realize that's probably quite a ways away).
I was interested in electrochemical 3D printing awhile back:
1. Deposition can be very precise (they say micron-level resolution here), but it's typically slow for a naive approach. That's not necessarily a problem if you need that precision. They say their approach is fast, probably by using some kind of array of nozzles (think an inkjet printer head).
2. You can also selectively run the process in reverse, so an electrochemical printer is actually a combo additive and subtractive manufacturing machine.
3. Because it's electrochemistry, I believe such a 3D printer is mostly restricted to depositing pure elemental metals and only a few alloys. This severely restricts your material selections.
Very cool to see this commercialized though, I'm curious how far they can take it.
> by using some kind of array of nozzles (think an inkjet printer head).
By bet is on electrospray ionization nozzles. It's a well understood technique thanks to mass spectrometers, it's just a matter of time before someone miniaturizes them and creates a way to control the spray pattern.
CTO of Fabric8 here - happy to answer any questions you may have about the technology or company. As you can tell we've got a process that's quite different than other metal AM techniques with some very unique benefits that we're excited to share!
Tons of questions, this is incredibly cool! Can you discuss:
1.) How you compensate for anode consumption/geometry changes over the lifetime of the anode. For instance, does the center get worn away or do you try to uniformly use each "pixel".
2.) More details on anode "pixel" geometry and minimum feature size.
3.) Can you talk about the development process? Did you have in situ measurement, or post build analysis of the part and anode.
It’s really cool and I wish I had one of these machines. On the assumption that I couldn’t afford such a machine myself for DIY, it would be really cool to have a send-cut-send like service. It seems like the relatively gentle process and I assume predictable results with minimal post processing would lend itself to an high degree of automation. Perhaps a scale out manufacturing set up where the speed of an individual machine is less important than the throughput of having many machines.
There are a lot of little random things that I would design if I knew there was a capability to have it made at non-aerospace prices. Initially heatsinks, manifolds, heat exchangers, but possibly many random things depending on the pricing.
It appears that Fabric8 do intend on targeting all the way down to low margin mass manufacturing with a high number of low cost machines which they run in house on a manufacturing service basis. They’re targeting 1000+ batches but I assume in time they’ll be able to do the very small batch stuff as well. Perhaps with a strategic partner that’ll deal with the small annoying customers like me. I’m super exited by this technology and am happy that they’re targeting areas that I think will be most impactful for the world of manufacturing, as well as long term profitable for them, and hopefully eventually very accessible for DIYers like myself.
1 - Yes, we are currently doing this
2 - Right now our focus is on flat substrates, curved surfaces are a little trickier
3 - Any pure metal or alloy system that can be electroplated would be compatible with our approach. Aluminum and Titanium are difficult but not impossible. We're focused on copper as our first commercial material but have other material systems in development.
4 - Our current pixel size is 33 microns, ~50micron negative features should be doable. Controlled wick structures are actually a really good application of the technology
5 - Our primary business model actually is to offer print services to our customers. Feel free to reach out to me via email in profile if there's an application you'd like to explore
Where does this fall on the hazardous/toxicity scale? What kind of off-gassing/risks are there, especially compared to existing high resolution powder based systems?
Disclaimer: I don’t know much about this field, this may be a dumb question.
Much safer than existing powder-based systems. The feedstock is effectively water based so none of the flammability risks of metal powder. No special gases required, no high powered lasers or thermal processing sytems.
That being said it still is an industrial process and requires responsible handling of the feedstock and equipment to ensure safety to personnel and the environment.
Metallic ionic solutions are usually strong acids. They are made by dissolving metal in sulfuric or nitric acids. Looks like they are using copper sulfate as the electrolyte. After the copper is deposited you are left with sulfuric acid.
That's a cool video. They even show creating multi-metal stuff with it, which seems like it'd be pretty lined up for creating meta-materials when using a small enough tip resolution. :)
First time hearing about the technique, sounds exciting.
I see a close comparison in features to SLM [1], which is already established as a core 3D Metal printing technique for a long time. SLM has precision down to the size of a mechanical pencil's lead. In what way is ECAM better? Is it more precision + no need to handle powder or shield gas + no need for laser source and containment, minus ECAM being slower. Am I missing some crucial feature?
Has there been any work on photoelectric plating? You could then use DPL to project a pattern for an entire layer at once. I'm not sure how one could ensure uniform thickness. Just wondering if the basics of such an approach have been developed or if its even possible.
I've considered the idea before and it seemed to me that since you need a fixed number of electrons for every metal ion you deposit that the currents end up being huge.
Also deposit speeds tend to be slow. How fast can your process layer metal (say in grams per hour)?
Yes, currents can be high as they directly correlate with build rate. But the voltages are typically low, making it a lower power process than one would think.
100-1000x faster than a typical electroplating process
As someone who's built/designed multiple metal 3D printers before, this actually looks really cool. Every metal 3D printer requires high temperatures, inert and reducing gasses to prevent oxidation, and most of them require powdered metal, whether for something like DMLS or powder bed technologies. The accuracy is also impressive.
One of the ancillary ideas that I and a few others came up with in exploring binder jetting was 3D organ printing because the feature size is quite small. I wonder if there's a world where you could use an analogous process on a solution of individual cells.
Yes! One of the major benefits from not using a powdered metal feedstock is that minimum feature size is no longer limited by powder size, and instead is determined by our electrode "pixel" size which is 33 microns today and will get even smaller over time.
The room temperature deposition process also means we can print directly onto substrates like PCBs, ceramics or Silicon wafers to enable some very unique functionality.
This looks like something I toyed with in 2016, but (as you may expect from my lack of relevant experience and qualifications) all I found were what Edison called "ways to not make a lightbulb".
The:
> microelectrode array printhead
in particular is what I wanted to experiment with, because something like this clearly allows parallelisation of the build process in much the same way photopolymerisation is faster than FDM.
Yes the microelectrode array is the key to driving parallelism of the process, making it area based (layer-at-once) rather than point deposition. DLP/LCD vs laser SLA or FDM is a good analogy!
My understanding is that most current metal 3d printing yields items with significantly worse properties with respect to shear forces, because of how the molecules align compared to when it's melted together as a whole and cooled (or something like that, I can't find the research paper someone linked to me in the past here regarding that).
Do we know if this is better with respect to that?
With some of the earlier ones that may have been the case as many were simply melting small blobs of metal and dropping them onto eachother. The newer ones act a lot more like a welder. It's why it's been possible to 3d print rocket components.
Texture (the statistical arrangement of all the crystal lattice arrangements that make up a metal) can play a role on mechanical properties, but current metal AM is more than able to meet material standards. It's good to be careful with blanket statements because the most accurate answer is usually "it depends."
I agree we should avoid blanket statements, which is why your statement "current metal AM is more than able to meet material standards" is problematic. What standards? There is no generic "material standards" for all materials, and 3d metal printing is definitely inferior to MOST other manufacturing methods in MOST circumstances, in terms of mechanical properties.
I'm not sure I made a blanket statement, except with respect to my understanding, and I can assure you that I was factually correct in my assessment of my own understanding. ;)
I was careful to phrase my comment in a way that I thought could lead to useful discussion, because I value that, and to note it was only my understanding, because my understanding is outdated and minimal. It just so happens that I was part of a prior discussion years ago regarding suitability of 3d printed metal parts, and found some information at that time which pointed to some of the problems they have in comparison to other methods, so was interesting in learning more.
There are so many ways to do metal 3D printing, that it really depends on technique and use-case. I can only comment on SLM (Powder is in a bed, melted by laser from above) and DED (Powder comes from a nozzle and melted by a laser from above), but you can easily move the resulting metal properties in very different directions, by adjusting an unending list of parameters. So many things happen can once when melting metal (hardening, tempering, martensitization), that you can make the result "properties with respect to shear" better or worse by tweaking the process.
Finding these parameters is a research field in of it itself and whether or not properties are better or worse in "most current metal 3d printing" really depends on your use-case and material. There is no blanket statement on how the material properties will be after these processes.
In general, the issues sintered parts have are slight porosity (<3%), slow annealing cycles (internal stress), and possible problems with conventional machining.
We also looked at metal-salt plating processes, and concluded the risks to the operator made it nonviable for general application. There was also the serious environmental impact risks, and that meant hazmat disposal costs etc.
Took me a while, but I tracked down the conversation. Turns out it wasn't a research paper, and I wasn't linked to it but found it on my own in researching the discussion I was having[1]. It was an a video about engineering and cost effectiveness of sintering metals and the current downsides, which (at the time) there were attempts to counter by using specific laser patterns, but even with that the fatigue life was lacking compared to other manufacturing methods.
This is, of course, four years out of date, and I can't state for certain how accurate the review of the problems that video provided were, but it did a very good job of explaining what caused those problems, so I wasn't left with many questions as to why sintering wasn't as well suited for some situations. That said, I'm not in this industry, I just noticed some relation to a prior conversation I had and the topic is interesting to me.
Great question! With thermal based processes that can certainly be a problem, but it's quite different with Electrochemical Additive Manufacturing (ECAM).
The ECAM process operates at room temperature and deposits material via electrodeposition - so no melting is involved! The resulting microstructure is a fine grained structure (avg. grain size ~ 500 - 1000 nm) with fairly equiaxed grains that provide high strength and isotropic behavior. So we don't see the same challenge that say a laser based process encounters due to melting and cooling.
This is one of the benefits of the ECAM process happening completely at room temperature. Since the metal is deposited directly out of a liquid metal feedstock there's no thermal processing (sintering, melting, etc) which have traditionally caused shrinkage/warpage and porosity issues in other metal AM technologies.
Since the ECAM process has control over the deposit at the atomic scale, an extremely high level of purity is achieved. This is very important for high performance applications requiring thermal or electrical conductivity for instance.
it's possible to electrodeposit metals with a variety of grain structures, including both strained and non-strained versions. strain is the main problem with processes like sls/slm
The headline (and thusfar only, it seems) application is a 3d metal printed waterblock with Asetek (the infamous AIO patent trolls, incidentally), with some hooplah about "quieter pumps" and better performance.
Arctic makes a line of AIO coolers which are among the lowest-cost, yet have industry-leading performance and can dissipate hundreds of watts with ease.
This just doesn't seem like an area that needs to be optimized. I could see certain applications like cooling high power RF stuff and lasers...but if this was the best they could do for their headline application, I'm a bit skeptical.
Either they're doing a poor job of commercializing it, it's got drawbacks that are deal-killers for a lot of industries, or something else...
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It's interesting to see this idea in action, though with my limited experience with electroplating it seems like it'd be absurdly slow.
[1] https://youtu.be/W1d36wbx_yg
Faster and it grows a sponge of copper (entrapped gas I assume).
I would like to know how they did it.
1. Deposition can be very precise (they say micron-level resolution here), but it's typically slow for a naive approach. That's not necessarily a problem if you need that precision. They say their approach is fast, probably by using some kind of array of nozzles (think an inkjet printer head).
2. You can also selectively run the process in reverse, so an electrochemical printer is actually a combo additive and subtractive manufacturing machine.
3. Because it's electrochemistry, I believe such a 3D printer is mostly restricted to depositing pure elemental metals and only a few alloys. This severely restricts your material selections.
Very cool to see this commercialized though, I'm curious how far they can take it.
By bet is on electrospray ionization nozzles. It's a well understood technique thanks to mass spectrometers, it's just a matter of time before someone miniaturizes them and creates a way to control the spray pattern.
Deleted Comment
1.) How you compensate for anode consumption/geometry changes over the lifetime of the anode. For instance, does the center get worn away or do you try to uniformly use each "pixel".
2.) More details on anode "pixel" geometry and minimum feature size.
3.) Can you talk about the development process? Did you have in situ measurement, or post build analysis of the part and anode.
4.) Typical surface finish?
There are a lot of little random things that I would design if I knew there was a capability to have it made at non-aerospace prices. Initially heatsinks, manifolds, heat exchangers, but possibly many random things depending on the pricing.
It appears that Fabric8 do intend on targeting all the way down to low margin mass manufacturing with a high number of low cost machines which they run in house on a manufacturing service basis. They’re targeting 1000+ batches but I assume in time they’ll be able to do the very small batch stuff as well. Perhaps with a strategic partner that’ll deal with the small annoying customers like me. I’m super exited by this technology and am happy that they’re targeting areas that I think will be most impactful for the world of manufacturing, as well as long term profitable for them, and hopefully eventually very accessible for DIYers like myself.
1) can you print on oxide, nitride, or carbide ceramics?
2) can you print on shaped materials? Like for example, printing a pcb directly onto the inner side of a rigid shell for an aerofoil/wing?
3) what sort of material restrictions come with electrochemical printing? Can you do aluminum? Titanium?
4) what is the minimum feature size? Could this, for example, print a controlled porous/wick structure with pore sizes around 50um?
5) for those of us without the capital to buy a printer, will you also offer printing services?
Disclaimer: I don’t know much about this field, this may be a dumb question.
That being said it still is an industrial process and requires responsible handling of the feedstock and equipment to ensure safety to personnel and the environment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-UbDk7LrvU
Best regards, =3
https://youtu.be/B-UbDk7LrvU?si=1GeqL7aoLbG6PBCH&t=462
I see a close comparison in features to SLM [1], which is already established as a core 3D Metal printing technique for a long time. SLM has precision down to the size of a mechanical pencil's lead. In what way is ECAM better? Is it more precision + no need to handle powder or shield gas + no need for laser source and containment, minus ECAM being slower. Am I missing some crucial feature?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_laser_melting
The images suggest pure copper. Are there any alloys that can be printed at this time?
You can get 10 PCBs for $20 including worldwide shipping. Pricing for CNC or laser cutting or 3D printing just doesn't go that low.
What kind of currents do you need?
I've considered the idea before and it seemed to me that since you need a fixed number of electrons for every metal ion you deposit that the currents end up being huge.
Also deposit speeds tend to be slow. How fast can your process layer metal (say in grams per hour)?
100-1000x faster than a typical electroplating process
One of the ancillary ideas that I and a few others came up with in exploring binder jetting was 3D organ printing because the feature size is quite small. I wonder if there's a world where you could use an analogous process on a solution of individual cells.
The room temperature deposition process also means we can print directly onto substrates like PCBs, ceramics or Silicon wafers to enable some very unique functionality.
This looks like something I toyed with in 2016, but (as you may expect from my lack of relevant experience and qualifications) all I found were what Edison called "ways to not make a lightbulb".
The:
> microelectrode array printhead
in particular is what I wanted to experiment with, because something like this clearly allows parallelisation of the build process in much the same way photopolymerisation is faster than FDM.
I can find my paper and post it but keep in mind it was a "undergraduate thesis" and something I spent only a very finite amount of time on.
how did your project go?
Do we know if this is better with respect to that?
I was careful to phrase my comment in a way that I thought could lead to useful discussion, because I value that, and to note it was only my understanding, because my understanding is outdated and minimal. It just so happens that I was part of a prior discussion years ago regarding suitability of 3d printed metal parts, and found some information at that time which pointed to some of the problems they have in comparison to other methods, so was interesting in learning more.
Dead Comment
Finding these parameters is a research field in of it itself and whether or not properties are better or worse in "most current metal 3d printing" really depends on your use-case and material. There is no blanket statement on how the material properties will be after these processes.
In general, the issues sintered parts have are slight porosity (<3%), slow annealing cycles (internal stress), and possible problems with conventional machining.
We also looked at metal-salt plating processes, and concluded the risks to the operator made it nonviable for general application. There was also the serious environmental impact risks, and that meant hazmat disposal costs etc.
There are always trade-offs with any technology.
Have a great day, =3
This is, of course, four years out of date, and I can't state for certain how accurate the review of the problems that video provided were, but it did a very good job of explaining what caused those problems, so I wasn't left with many questions as to why sintering wasn't as well suited for some situations. That said, I'm not in this industry, I just noticed some relation to a prior conversation I had and the topic is interesting to me.
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24795406
2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzBRYsiyxjI
The ECAM process operates at room temperature and deposits material via electrodeposition - so no melting is involved! The resulting microstructure is a fine grained structure (avg. grain size ~ 500 - 1000 nm) with fairly equiaxed grains that provide high strength and isotropic behavior. So we don't see the same challenge that say a laser based process encounters due to melting and cooling.
-Fabric8Labs
Since the ECAM process has control over the deposit at the atomic scale, an extremely high level of purity is achieved. This is very important for high performance applications requiring thermal or electrical conductivity for instance.
https://www.servethehome.com/next-gen-copper-cold-plates-so-...
Arctic makes a line of AIO coolers which are among the lowest-cost, yet have industry-leading performance and can dissipate hundreds of watts with ease.
This just doesn't seem like an area that needs to be optimized. I could see certain applications like cooling high power RF stuff and lasers...but if this was the best they could do for their headline application, I'm a bit skeptical.
Either they're doing a poor job of commercializing it, it's got drawbacks that are deal-killers for a lot of industries, or something else...