Developing of a 3D Printer to Produce Parts Using Powder Metal

The additive manufacturing (AM) process or three-dimensional printing (3DP) process is making stereoscopic shapes using a layered system. There are several materials used for printing such as plastic, wood, metal as powder, filament, liquid, or others, and there are also different ways for printing. Recently, the focus has been on metal printing, but the problem is that the high energy used such as laser, electron beam, or high heat to melt the metal to print it as required. For this reason, the price of 3D printers for metal is very expensive. In this paper, the design and implementation of a 3D printer for metal parts production are worked. The work also includes making an experimental test for the new 3D printer and printing 3D metal parts without using heat. In this work, Tevo-Tarantula 3D printer has been modified in terms of software and hardware. Two new extruders are designed to inject the metal powder and adhesive, where the heat was removed from the extruder head and the printer bed. The metal powder extruder contains a powder reservoir, glass funnel, and access valve where controlled through the solenoid valve. The adhesive extruder is controlled using a simple hydraulics. The printing process was done by printing two layers of metal powder and a layer of adhesive depending on the desired shape to create 3D objects using the SolidWorks software. Different metal models were printed and these models were compared with the original design which was drawing by SolidWorks software. The difference between the actual model drawing and the printed parts is differences between (0.004 mm) for some parts to (2.3 mm) for other parts or the percentage of error is between (0.1% - 4%) for the printed parts. However, the material can be used in high temperatures, where rubber materials cannot be used, and in applications requiring porosity