For Turbomachinery designers, current manufacturing technologies often limit the features and geometries that could improve performance. Complex internal channels, airfoil geometries, and thin walls are common features but, often, when it comes to manufacturing there are few choices available. As an engineer, this can be frustrating: you can design it, and you can simulate it, but you cannot make it. By changing or even eliminating the DfM (Design for Manufacturing) restrictions on part design, you can finally achieve the performance that your design and simulation software predict.
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Production Quality Metal
VELO3D’s solution was designed from the ground up to address these types of challenges. Companies like Honeywell and Aerojet Rocketdyne are already working with VELO’s technology to improve performance on parts that control the flow of fluids and heat. With VELO3D’s solution, surface finish, porosity, tensile strength, and fatigue life are all within a tight statistical deviation. This ensures that when printing at lower angles to the build plate (down to horizontal for some parts) without supports, the metal is production quality. By maintaining consistent material properties for printed parts, the final product requires less post processing to achieve target specifications. This enables the production of high-quality internal channels and thin walls that are critical to turbo machinery applications.
Quality Control
In laser powder bed fusion, a single build may consist of 1,000’s of layers, each containing 1,000,000’s of laser hatch marks, equaling 1,000,000,000’s of events. For conventional printers, these events are often question marks when it comes to the quality of the part. However, with modern computing power and sensors, VELO is making those question marks into check marks. To achieve consistent results month to month, printer to printer, VELO has invested into a quality control system that works even before the build begins. Through a three-part approach of calibration, tracking, and reporting, engineers can see that their parts print to standard every time.
Summary
VELO3D unlocks manufacturing for optimized designs that control the flow of fluids and the transfer of heat. These parts often feature complex internal geometries that are too difficult for conventional manufacturing solutions. This forces engineers to compromise performance to enable manufacturability. Through a state-of-the-art 3D Metal Printing solution, VELO3D technology eliminates this compromise by offering advanced manufacturing that unlocks maximum part performance.
