Liquid Metal 3D Printing to Revolutionize Manufacturing
A father and son team in University at Buffalo's START-UP NY program have invented a liquid metal printing machine that could represent a significant transformation in manufacturing. Former University at Buffalo student Zack Vader initially had the idea five years ago, and now produces the machines through his Amherst, NY-based company Vader Systems, of which his mechanical engineer father is CEO. His breakthrough came when he thought to expose molten metal in a confined chamber with an orifice to a pulsed magnetic field. The transient field induces a pressure with the metal that ejects a droplet. That was the key to making droplets of liquid metal eject from a nozzle. Other metal printers use a process of laying down powered metal and melting it with a laser or electron beam. In that process, some particles of the powder do not get melted, creating weakened spots.
Transcript
00:00:10 [Music] so the existing Technologies uh um use very expensive input materials and operate slowly so that's um that means that uh your price per printed part is uh extraordinarily high right now it's about $100,000 a kilowatt it's quite slow with just one Kil laser so you need two and then you need three to keep going faster you have to keep stepping
00:00:35 it up our metal printing system works by taking in um commodity priced aluminum wires so we feed this this solid wire into the our our ceramic uh nozzle so we heat we heat up our our nozzle so the melting point of aluminum um well actually a little Beyond we heat to 750° C Which is, 1400° F solid wire goes in melts into this nozzle then we have an electromagnetic coil that sits outside
00:01:02 the ceramic nozzle and we energize this coil when we energize this coil we create a magnetic field which pushes inward on the metal and that produces a droplet every time we produce a magnetic field it squeezes a droplet and so we do that about a thousand times a second similar to the way an ink jet printer prints with droplets of ink to make your image we print with very fine droplets
00:01:26 of metal um my one of my lieutenants that my my father taught me an engine engering is use use um off-the-shelf Parts as much as possible so if you don't don't reinvent the wheel right uh University of busal has been a great help in uh from very early on when we're in the basement trying to understand uh the parameters of the physics pretty much our whole staff is
00:01:49 from UB School of Engineering our our only uh Rea interaction with our competitors um so was at the imts show so we were swamped I mean we we had six people going all week long and uh met over 2,000 people it's an idea that's time has come I think it's was very exciting [Applause]