Advanced Manufacturing

The Advanced Manufacturing sector deals with studying and optimising the use of PBF (power bed fusion) additive manufacturing technology, i.e. the selective fusion of successive layers of metal powders that are still little studied, such as copper and its alloys, but are innovative in many critical applications.
It is part of the project to position the Foundation as a Centre of Competence and Benchmarking of Advanced Additive Manufacturing. PBF includes both SLM (Selective Laser Melting), which uses one or more lasers as a melting source, and SEBM (Selective Electron Beam Melting), which uses a collimated electron beam.
The layer-by-layer approach makes it possible to tackle the production of components with geometries so complex that they cannot be machined with traditional production technologies.

How does the department work?

The Department operates in all phases of the production process, which can be grouped in the following way :

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Optimization of the hardware system (in collaboration with external manufacturers who turn to FEA to study and improve their SLM systems, already on the market). FEA has also developed, with other partners, a new electron beam printer (patent pending)

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Development of the melting process. Starting from the study of the powders, the parameters that characterize the process are optimized. The components are then analyzed for density, roughness, electrical and thermal conductivity, mechanical resistance and surface quality through optical or SEM microscopy and geometric tolerances

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Dedicated design and re-design of components projected for traditional processes. Through the use of specific software, components are conceived according to the geometric dictates imposed by the SLM process, or designs already conceived for other production techniques are geometrically and topologically optimized

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Development of ad hoc post-processing. In this activity, the post-production treatments that an additive component usually needs are optimized and mainly refer to surface treatments performed by means of mechanical, electrochemical, thermal and HIP processes