Next gen 3D metal printing
fabric8labs.com
fabric8labs.com
It's interesting to see this idea in action, though with my limited experience with electroplating it seems like it'd be absurdly slow.
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.
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.
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.
I understand that it is not in Fabric8s interest to do this though, expensive machines are high margin and exclusivity is required to maintain a bit of a monopoly for their customers so that their customers can justify purchasing the expensive machines in the first place. If Fabric8 were to start out with expensive machines and then subsequently release cheaper machines they would burn their previous customers. That would make this one of the many cool things that I can't use until the patents expire which would be a damn shame and would also make the technology completely uninteresting to me as I would have to focus on alternatives in the interim. It took a long time to go from Rep-Rap to Bambu Labs for FDM but with increased interest in the space that process is speeding up. Hopefully Micronics will manage a consumer Nylon SLS printer. A ton of small scale manufacturing technology is being made cheaply enough for home use and services like PCBWay and Send-Cut-Send have really democratized high quality manufacturing. I can make many things production quality with near zero overheads and I can buy things from others who have done the same at similarly low costs.
Something like send-cut-send for ECAM seems inevitable and it would be up to Fabric8 to decide if they want to cannibalize themselves instead of having someone else undercut them. I don't know how defendable their patents are, there does seem to be a fair amount of prior art. There is probably a bunch of trade secrets though. For them one of the downsides of having such a promising solution is that there is an even greater incentive for competitors to enter the market. I would posit that long term there is more money to be made with a scale-out low margin mass market solution where they could better leverage trade secrets gleaned from process experience than than selling individual high margin machines. If they kept overheads low enough it would never be in anyone else's interest to enter the market and they could leverage their trade secrets for above average returns ad infinitum.
This is literally what Shapeways does: https://www.shapeways.com/marketplace
I specifically called out that ECAM should be amenable to low cost mass manufacturing in a way that metal SLS is not.
Are you doing it for the whole cooling unit from scratch or just 1 part? (like a fan or some holder)?
What is the most common reason you would order v2 from the manufacturer after you receive v1 and test it in the real world?
I run a on-prem mini cluster which is water cooled but the customers need edge compute which should stay air cooled. I would probably try to make a blower style vapor chamber for nvidia gpus so I can ram air through without dealing with nvidia driver fuckery. NVidia segments the market based on heat sinks, binning and drivers so the enterprises segment has to pay far more. The 4090 blowers made by OEMs are gimped, rare, and expensive and I think intentionally so.
Not only is consumer grade cheaper but it’s way less hassle to get - the Enterprise sales pipeline is a total pain as the costs keep changing and they keep trying to push older overpriced stuff onto me like I wouldn’t notice. And thats even if they think you’re big enough to talk to. Much easier to pull consumer stuff from the market on an as needed basis.
My software supports graceful degradation so I don’t need ‘enterprise’ reliability. I don’t need high speed interconnects either. I need TFLOPS on dense matmuls, run in parallel batches. Consumer GPUs are fine for this, replace the heatsinks with a blower optimized and put in some powerful fans and take off. I could pack more into a single computer and to have a lower amortized cost and a higher density.
If the vapor chamber blower heatsink is too expensive then I might as well just buy more GPU computers and let them run slower.
I would prefer to be able to:
[x] buy a GPU, -> [v] Download SimReady USD of your GPU from nVidia website.
[v] whip up some CAD
[v] import USD of nVidia card into CAD
[v] measure the geometry using CAD
[v] Design cooling element
-> Export CAD to USD
-> Import CAD as SimReady Asset into nVidia Omniverse with tests you need.
-> Once simulation is OK send final CAD to production (or better from GPU simulation into simulation of production on one of the factories or 3d printers)
In this scenario:
- SimReady USD of a GPU must already exist inside nVidia. They could make it available for simulation inside Omniverse. (or build open high level model yourself)
- Thermal simulation app is something that nVidia needs for their business now and in the future. They could share current software with public and let people like you download it, change it and run simulations with your changes (or build open high level model yourself)
I'm wondering how difficult it would be to simulate important effects on your models. Do you think the above process has potential to improve your process or did I miss some important detail of your work?
For me, good enough is good enough I’m not going to be super optimized as the cost tradeoffs for such optimizations don’t work out as favorable at my scale.
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.
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
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-UbDk7LrvU
Best regards, =3
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?
The images suggest pure copper. Are there any alloys that can be printed at this time?
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) 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?
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?
https://darkcephas.github.io/MELED_paper/MELED_paper.pdf
From what I heard the state of the art was to move away from electrodes and to use lasers. So how that works is that you have the normal electrolytic solution but you apply a passive voltage below the activation voltage. Then you use the laser to break down the double layer at the substrate surface. This leads to laser controlled deposition.
i feel like it's probably easier to have 1000 electrodes than 1000 lasers tho
• SLA resin printers use a superfast/accurate motorised mirror to direct the laser where its wanted
• mSLA resin printers use a strong light source instead of a laser + an LCD to mask the area they don't want exposed
Do we know if this is better with respect to that?
Right now you can print aerospace quality parts on hardware that's designed for marine grade parts, which we did by testing them to failure.
The only reason why the price is higher for aerospace is that you need to certify the machines and the environment in which they work and that costs an arm and a leg.
metal and or ceramic slurry:
Service for the SLS process:
Or wait a bit longer for a good community design release...
Have fun =3
(for some parts)
Forged? Stamped? Die cast? Investment cast? Billet/machined?
Each of those has vastly different characteristics.
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.
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.
The more exotic experimental processes intended for hobbyists will likely overtake industry in the next year... ;-)
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.
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.
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
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...
The tungsten capability really throws me for a loop. As someone who TIG welds in my spare time, I can’t imagine having a machine in my shop that could make electrodes. The amount of energy required must be … a lot.
disclaimer: I'm a GP at Asimov Ventures and invested in Fabric8labs' pre-seed round.
> "directly print pure copper, which has historically been very difficult"
SLM [1] has been able to 3D print Copper with precision down to the size of a mechanical pencil's lead for a long time already. In what way is ECAM better? Is it more precision + no need to handle powder + no need for laser source and containment - ECAM being slower, or am I missing some crucial feature?
> oxidation at high temperatures
SLM machines typically use an Argon gas chamber. DED machines use an Argon gas shield.
> It’s more typical to print copper alloys than pure copper.
In the context of modern SLM, it depends on your definition of "pure" and "alloy". During the process, a bit of resin to is mixed into the powder and heat treated in a final step to get to 99.9% pure copper.
edit: Just fixed up my knowledge. Indeed alloys are typically used (99% copper with things like Chrome added on depending on use-case), tough the pure copper can be used with higher laser power.
I think there’s still quite active research in the area, though, and no doubt there’s a lot going on that I don’t know! https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S026412752...
The copper use-case is what kick-ed off an industry-wide race towards offering blue laser as an option. There is more than just wavelength that goes into printing good copper results, but that is a major factor.
Any idea or references on how ECAM would compare to that?
slm and ded and metal paste deposition just have to rearrange some crystal structures; in electrolysis (including ecm machining) and electrodeposition you have to actually rip molecules apart, atom by atom and electron by electron
basically you're charging a battery, so you can get a rough idea by thinking about how much energy a battery could store if it was the same size as your desired workpiece
That just does not sound cheap. One envisions a cost-distributed 3D effort, with this used for certain critical parts.
I'm imagining a human-sized tank, continuously growing things by electroplating, slowly, slowly, but eventually making something quite big.
I find this concept very appealing. I don't quite understand how it though, because I have view of electroplating as something which is very different from this precise and presumably at least somewhat fast process.
https://patents.google.com/patent/US10724146B1/en
Edit: I wonder what compensation for anode consumption looks like. Model based? I assume in-situ measurement/process control is hard.
Random extremely minor typo spotted, “worforce” instead of “workforce” in the 2nd entry of the “in the press” section.
derctuo and dernocua also contain some explorations of it
derctuo contains my notes from 02020, published in 02020, including three that discuss this process: https://derctuo.github.io/notes/electrodeposition-3d-printin... https://derctuo.github.io/notes/foam-electro-etching.html https://derctuo.github.io/notes/cyclic-fabrication-systems.h...
in dernocua, my notes from 02021, published in 02021, https://dernocua.github.io/notes/fresnel-mirror-electropolis... discusses using it to make optics, https://dernocua.github.io/notes/freezer-seacrete.html discusses using it to deposit rock rather than metal (much faster), https://dernocua.github.io/notes/layers-plus-electroforming.... discusses a process hybridized with lamination of 2-D cut layers to get the rough form, and https://dernocua.github.io/notes/electrolytic-berlinite.html discusses the possibility of using it to print refractory chemically bonded ceramics