Victrex has announced it is preparing newly developed materials for Additive Manufacturing (AM).
The first of these is a high strength material for laser sintering (LS) which attains lower refresh rates, resulting in improved recycling for unsintered powder.
The second is a filament with better Z-strength than existing PolyArylEtherKetone (PAEK) materials and better printability for filament fusion (FF).
Advantages of additive manufacturing include reduce costs, shortened time to market and enabling the production of parts too complex to be manufactured using traditional methods.
Victrex
Additive Manufactured PAEK Demo Bracket –Filament Fusion (left) Laser Sinter (right)
A first generation of PAEK material for Laser Sintering can only be recycled in a low extent and require nearly full refresh of the printing bed with new powder.
PEEK filaments available for FF have poor interlayer bonding, leading to a loss in Z-strength.
“Breakthrough technology is paving the way for an exciting future for Additive Manufacturing PAEK. The powder recycle work for Laser Sintering, using the new Victrex development polymer grades has gone very well, with no measurable loss of properties when test components were made from partially recycled powder,” John Grasmeder, Chief Scientist at Victrex.
We believe it will be possible to re-use all of the non-sintered powder that is recovered after a build run. This will result in a significant reduction in material costs compared to current PolyArylEtherKetone materials where up to 40 per cent of the polymer is wasted and cannot be recycled.”
The detailed technical results are expected to be presented at the bi-annual Additive Manufacturing conference of the University of Exeter Centre for Additive Layer Manufacturing (CALM), in September 2018.