Invited lecture opening the section of Non-beam Additive Manufacturing of Metals.
Abstract: Material extrusion additive manufacturing, also known as fused filament fabrication (FFF), is an economical technology capable of producing metal and ceramic components. It is also a complementary technology to powder injection moulding (PIM), since similar feedstocks are used.
A binder was developed and loaded with sinterable powders between 40 to 55 vol.%. The resulting feedstock can be extruded to filaments processable in low-cost FFF machines. It has been demonstrated that the binder can be used with numerous powders like alumina, cermet, copper, hard-metal, neodymium-iron-boron, titanium, steel and zirconia. The binder can be partly solvent extracted, and these parts are finally thermally debound and sintered. This binder also allows the production of multi-material parts.
This article presents the results of processing two types of stainless steels (316L and 17-4PH) using filaments with the special binder system. For 316L, 3 point bending specimens were produced, while for 17-4PH tensile specimens were produced and tested.