Refractory Metal Is Used In 3D Printing, Do You Know?

Aug 19, 2019

You may have seen 3D printing, but most of them use plastic as the printing material, but tungsten, molybdenum, rhenium and other refractory metal materials are used in 3D printing, do you know?

3D printing

3D printing, which emerged in the mid-1990s, is the latest rapid prototyping device using technologies such as light curing and paper stacking. It works in much the same way as a print printer, which contains "printing materials" such as liquid or powder that are connected to a computer and then controlled by a computer to build them up one on top of another, eventually turning the blueprints on the computer into physical objects.

What are the difficulties of using refractory metal to make 3D printing materials in China?

Tungsten, molybdenum, rhenium and other materials have high melting points. For example, tungsten has a melting point of 3410 degrees. It is very difficult to make them into spherical powder for 3D printing.

At present, the core technology of related equipment and materials for 3D printing of metal spherical powder is mainly controlled in Germany, the United States, Japan and other countries. The preparation of its metal spherical powder has been industrialized production, and the technical standard system of powder raw materials and products has been established. In recent years, our country in 3 d printing equipment, metal manufacturing process, process control, process stability, etc, have also made significant progress, but the material aspects of the bottleneck problem has not been a major breakthrough, especially super fine 3 d printing refractory metal spherical powder in material purity, sphericity, spheroidizing ratio and batch on indicators such as stability, have a great gap with developed countries, it is hard to meet the pressing needs of our country's aerospace and other high-end manufacturing.

As an advanced processing technology that can lead the production technology revolution, 3D printing technology of metal materials is still in the primary stage of development in China at present. We believe that we can overcome all kinds of difficulties and make breakthroughs in various fields in the near future.