3D Printed Houses?

[IROC]

More recent news on this technology. This work was done in my facility:

https://neutrons.ornl.gov/content/vulcan-forges-new-science-future-3d-printed-metal

[mjohnson]

Originally Posted by IROC

More recent news on this technology. This work was done in my facility:

https://neutrons.ornl.gov/content/vulcan-forges-new-science-future-3d-printed-metal

As a metallurgy grad student at Los Alamos in the late '90s I saw their rig for doing metal additive "manufacturing". Also that was simultaneous with the whole "functionally graded materials" trend/mania so there were dreams of, envision one solid steel item, putting "a pinch of" hardness here, toughness there, weldability over there and so on. The actual goal was to use it for more interesting materials, like refractory metals, but feedstock was really tough to figure out.

Then I think the PI died and we just handed most of it over to Sandia Labs.

It's funny that now that we're over the "nano" thing, 3-D printing is back. What's sexy in my mind there is the "AI/natural/evolved" structures where you plug into a computer what you really need and you might get an optimized solution that looks like a tree which, while nearly impossible to machine, is kind of easy to print.

But do we really need 3D houses? Heck, that (I forgot the real term for it) system of foundations where one or two people can "Lego" a set of hollow polystyrene-clad forms together in a day and pour that afternoon? Short of those scandi-hyperefficient houses heated with body heat - I want that stuff if I ever built a house.

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])

[IROC]

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!!

[island911]