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lead to useful discussion, because I value that, and to note it was only my understanding, because my understanding is outdated and minimal.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.
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This is, of course, four years out of date, and I can't state for certain how accurate the review of the problems that video provided were, but it did a very good job of explaining what caused those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.
The more exotic experimental processes intended for hobbyists will likely overtake industry in the next year... ;-)
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.