3D Printing Extreme Temperatures (But Only If You’re NASA)

At a level that many Hackaday readers are following, the advent of affordable 3D printing has revolutionized prototyping, so as long as the desktop printer’s resolution is sufficient and the part can be made of thermoplastic or resin, it can be in your hands without too long a wait. The same thing happened on a much higher level, but for those with very deep pockets, it extends to high-performance exotics that desktop FDM owners can only dream of.

NASA, for example, is reporting on a new 3D-printable nickel-cobalt-chromium alloy It can produce extremely durable laser sintered metal parts that can withstand up to 2000 Fahrenheit, or 1033 Celsius for non-Americans. This has obvious applications for an organization that produces spacecraft, therefore Of course they are excited about it.

The alloy gets some of its properties because of it Reinforced dispersion oxide formation, in which the metal oxide grains are dispersed between its structure. We’re not metallurgists here at Hackaday, but we understand that discrepancies in the layers of metal atoms caused by oxides in the alloy’s crystal structure result in the higher energy required to shear the structure.

While these particular materials may never be affordable for us mere mortals to play with, NASA has previously looked at how to significantly reduce the cost of high-temperature 3D printing by modifying an existing open-source machine.