HP's Metal 3D Jet printer can build your next car's innards

Humans have figured out lots of ways to shape metal – casting it with a mold, stamping it, drilling holes and milling surfaces in a machine shop, even zapping it with a laser. Well, now you can add a new method: 3D printing.

A number of companies offer metal 3D printing, which creates products and components layer by layer with a computer-controlled system tracing its lineage to ordinary inkjet printers. But on Monday, HP announced it's entered the market with the ambition to dramatically lower prices, courtesy of a $ 400,000 product called the Metal Jet.

"We're really going to enable mass production for mainstream metals, in particular steels," said Tim Weber, head of 3D metal printing for HP.

Volkswagen and Johnson & Johnson Medical Devices. So do not be surprised if your next car's gears or suspension links are built from this new method of digital manufacturing.

Consulting firm McKinsey sees a bright future for the technology. "It is expected to be as much as $ 10 billion by 2030 to 2035," it said in a 2017 report. "We expect the current low-scale experiments to shift to greater industrial adoption within the next five to 10 years."

Why use 3D metal printing?

3D printing, also called additive manufacturing, allows you to be able to manufacture conventional methods. For example, you can make a lot of things with this product.

Although 3D printing is more common today, it's not the first approach you'd use for manufacturing mainstream products. It is often used to fabricate prototypes, and even though you can make 3D-printed plastic guns, 3D-printed metal products and components are a relative rarity.

Sci-fi authors are excited by the possibilities of 3D printing. Emma Newman's Planetfall, Stanley Kim's Robinson Aurora and Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age show off machines that can produce everything from spacecraft parts to internal organs. We're nowhere near that future, but 3D metal printing is a step in that direction, and there's more coming.

For example, 3D printing with multiple materials – say, using very durable metal on a gear. "We've already done things like that in the lab," Weber said.

3D printing can be faster, reduces metal waste, combines multiple components that would otherwise be assembled, and enable "mass customization" – large-scale production of fine-tuned parts.

How HP 3D metal printing works

HP's Jet Metal does not produce a finished product, though.

It starts with a thin layer of powdered ugly metal down on a bed. Then a line of print heads, glue, basically – where solid metal is needed. When one layer is done, a new layer of powder is used for the binding agent. It is about a product or a product of the printer, which is about 17x13x8 inches.

The printer works at very high resolution. Its smallest metal element – a voxel – measures just 20x20x50 microns, or millionths of a meter. For comparison, human hairs range from about 17 to 181 microns in diameter.

When it is done printing, the parts are taken out and the unused powder is separated for reuse. The parts then undergo a heating operation called sintering that fuses the powder into a solid block. Sintering technology is decades old but complex, which is why Parmatech and GKN Powder Metallurgy.

You're still not done, though. Sintering reduces the size of the share by 15 percent, Weber said, and secondary processing puts on the finishing touches.

Why is this better than 3D printing from rivals like Markforged, Xometry or 3D Systems? Weber promises faster print times since HP's PageWide technology moves the bandwagon through the world. And HP is committed to lowering costs because it develops and manufactures its own parts.

"We have 30-plus years of figuring out how to throw crazy stuff," Weber said.

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