14 June 2021 ESRFnews

With its ultra-rapid cycles of melting and solidification, additive manufacturing poses big challenges for material science. Synchrotron techniques are best placed to answer them.

THE past decade has been a turbulent time for those developing additive manufacturing, or 3D printing as it is commonly known. From about 2011, shortly after the first consumer 3D printers came on sale, expectations sky-rocketed. Technology pundits believed that the devices would soon be used routinely to print consumables, fashion items, prosthetic limbs, organs, entire vehicles anything so intricate that it would be impossible to manufacture traditionally in a single piece. The US magazine Wired ran a front cover depicting a 3D printer named after the replicator in the science-fiction television series Star Trek with the headline, This machine will change the world . Even politicians were won over. In his 2013 state of the union speech, the then US president Barack Obama said that 3D printing has the potential to revolutionise the way we make almost everything . In hindsight, such claims were premature. Today,

domestic 3D printers are still a rarity, and the vast major- ity of commercial products are still mass-manufactured by traditional processes. Nevertheless, the science and engineering of additive manufacturing has continued to develop and, in recent years, at an increasing pace. Part of the reason for this boost is the use of synchrotron X-rays to probe the outputs of additive manufacturing, and the process itself. Unlike traditional processes for manufacturing, which take place over seconds, additive manufacturing particularly in the case of metals involves the repeated melting and solidification of start- ing materials over milliseconds, often producing objects with very different properties. As was obvious from the discussions at a workshop on the topic held jointly by the ESRF and the Institut Laue-Langevin earlier this month, synchrotron techniques are well able to access these timescales, and the differences in nanoscale struc- tures of finished products. As a result, says ESRF user and

NEED FOR SPEED ADDITIVE MANUFACTURING

In professional sport, where every drop of performance matters, additive manufacturing has already made a real difference. In 2015, the British cyclist Bradley Wiggins rode a bicycle fitted with handlebars (inset image) printed at the University of Sheffield in the UK, in collaboration with ESRF user Peter Lee (see main story). Clocking up more than 54 km in an hour, he set a new world track record.

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