3D-Printed Magnets Outperform Traditional Versions & Conserve Rare Materials
Oak Ridge National Laboratory scientists have made isotropic, neodymium-iron-boron bonded permanent magnets using their Big Area Additive Manufacturing (BAAM) machine. The new magnets outperform bonded magnets made using traditional techniques while conserving critical materials. The project is part of the Department of Energy's Critical Materials Institute (CMI), which seeks ways to eliminate and reduce reliance on rare earth metals. While conventional sintered magnet manufacturing can result in material waste of as much as 30 to 50 percent, additive manufacturing will simply capture and reuse those materials with nearly zero waste. The printing process also produces complex shapes, requires no tooling, and is faster than traditional injection methods - potentially resulting in a much more economic manufacturing process.
Transcript
00:00:02 [Music] the critical materials Institute is bringing scientists from industry universities and the National Labs together to achieve a common goal we want to make sure we have the supply of critical materials for clean energy Technologies and the idea is to develop a new technology that can be scaled from the technology
00:00:31 level from the sence all the way into the applications at Oakridge I'm part of the additive manufacturing of permanent magnets that can be used in automobiles and Windmill and a lot of motors and generators and we use the facilities available at oakrid particularly manufacturing demonstration facilities to print bonded magnets and we have been
00:00:58 using two methods binder jetting method it's more like an inkject process and big area additive manufacturing you can actually minimize the critical materials waste and also no tooling necessary for this technique so we can use complex 3D objects from a computer and also there is no limitation of sizes and the sprting speed is almost 200 times better than any other uh 3D
00:01:29 printing techniques no until now and it's already on power are better than injection molding molder technique that they use for the current the magnets