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It's Not a Star Trek Replicator, but It's Getting Close

Back in 1980, an adventure novel – The Probability Broach –by L. Neil Smith was published that used the plot device of alternate universes. A police detective gets kicked into a parallel reality. A bit of evidence of his coming from a different timeline was a handgun he carried.

Analysis showed that the gun was carved and tooled from larger pieces of metal. In other words, machined. How did that differ from the weapons carried by the alternative detective? In that universe, objects were created by molecular deposition.

Okay, that all sounds interesting, but what's that got to do with machining and metalworking. Well, it seems like we're on the verge of building parts from scratch rather than machining them.

Various technologies over the past 20 years or so have promised prototypes built a layer at a time. First there was stereolithography and more recently we've seen 3D printing. Somewhere in the cluttere top of my desk is an adjustable cresent plastic wrench made using a 3D printer. They've gone from machines costing $100,000+ and the size of a big refrigerator to something that fits on a desktop. A big desktop, but a desktop.

But, what good is a plastic wrench except for prototyping for dimensioning? Not too much, but that's changing.

A Fundamental Aeronautics Program team led by Karen Taminger, at the NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, VA, has created a manufacturing process and prototype system for Electron Beam Freeform Fabrication, EBF3.

It uses an electron beam to melt layers of material and apply them to build a part a layer at a time using a CAD drawing as a template.

 One of the advantages of this process is the ability to incorporate dissimilar materials into a part during construction. For instance, fiber-optic sensors can be built into a metallic part while it is being built.

The process holds enough promise that major aircraft manufacturers are funding part of the research.

One of the advantages this process offers is less scrap. For instance, instead of machining a 600 lb piece of titanium into a 200 lb finished part, EBF3 technology holds the promise of creating a part from near final stock.

Another advantage of EBF3 is the prospect of a machine to create universal parts. This is of interest to the space program with the eventual goal of having a system to create large or replacement parts in space without the need or heavy machine tools.

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Last modified: 01/15/10