A study on the use of kilohertz acoustic energy for aluminum shaping and mass transport in ambient condition metal 3D printing

This research work demonstrates the process feasibility of Ultrasonic Filament Modeling process as a metal additive manufacturing process. Additive manufacturing (or 3d printing) is the method to manufacture 3d objects layer by layer. Current direct or indirect metal additive manufacturing processes either require a high power heat source like a laser or an electron beam, or require some kind of a post processing operation to produce net-shape fully-dense 3D components. The novel process of Ultrasonic Filament Modeling uses ultrasonic energy to achieve voxel deformation and inter-layer and intra-layer mass transport between voxels causing metallurgical bonding between the voxels. This enables the process to build net-shape 3D components at room temperature and ambient conditions. Two parallel mechanisms, ultrasonic softening and enhanced mass transport due to ultrasonic irradiation enable the voxel shaping and bonding respectively. This work investigates ultrasonic softening and the mass transport across voxels. Microstructural changes in aluminium during the voxel shaping have also been investigated. The temperature evolution during the process has been analyzed and presented in this work.