Title: Electromagnetic methods for improved production of additive manufacturing materials

Abstract

Additive manufacturing is one of the rapidly growing industries today. There are various types of metal additive manufacturing allowing to create complicated custom parts quickly and effective. Limiting factors of this technology are slow printing process and high cost of the initial material. Raw material for metal 3D printing is special powder or wire. Metal powder for additive manufacturing needs to have spherical shape, amorphous structure and narrow size distribution. Metal powder is produced by gas atomization process where metal is melted, and droplets are dispersed by inert gas jet. This process still has some shortages and that is why additive manufacturing quality metal powder is still expensive, thus limiting faster adaption of the technology. Wire is produced by controlled oriented solidification. In this work we investigate the application of electromagnetic processing to improve material production process for metal additive manufacturing. Stationary magnetic field and injected electric current is one of the methods how to induce force in the liquid metal and affect its solidification. Pulsed magnetic fields can be a good tool for grain refinement and how to control equiaxed to columnar transition. This may solve several issues and affect the production process leading to better outcome and possibility to control various aspects of the metal solidification process. Institute of Physics University of Latvia has great experience and experimental basis to carry out this research. Various experimental research results well be presented.