Quote:
Originally Posted by mjohnson
Oh, and 3-D metal? Wow, welding in 2-ishD is still kind of magic - there's lots that we are still learning as it is pretty far from a equilibrium process. Moving into another dimension is crazy. So much opportunity! I'm not sure what neutrons bring, but if you have lots of neutrons why not? (I are not neutron-material interaction person but I thought they pretty much just cruise through whatever. Would have guessed that there wouldn't be much spatial contrast/signal to work with - though for the right atoms and the right energies you can do interesting things [heh])
|
Neutrons allow us to peer into the lattice structure of materials and "see" the changes in that structure (strain, essentially) at extremes of pressure, temperature, magnetic fields, etc. In the case above, neutron scattering allowed a real-time assessment of stresses being induced into the material as it was being printed/machined.
A lot of the equipment in my world is very difficult to fabricate using conventional machining, so we have been turning to additive manufacturing. For instance, we inject helium gas bubbles into our liquid mercury flow to mitigate cavitation and pressure pulse-induced stresses (that become fatigue stress issues since our 316L SS target sees over 5x10^8 pulses of energy over its lifetime). The helium bubble size and distribution in the mercury flow is critical, so the "bubblers" are very complex. We 3-D print them out of titanium as they can't be machined conventionally. I know some folks at CERN also (LHC) that 3-D printed a lithium heat exchanger for the same reasons...
Fun stuff!!