Swedish firm VBN Components has been making high-performance, high-wear additive powders for a number of years now. Usually working with high-carbide-content materials, the company has brought the hardest 3D printing steel to market, as well as biocompatible materials. Now the company has increased the wear resistance of slurry pumps. Working with an unnamed pump company (possibly Atlas Copco, Metso, or Grindex), they’ve developed a new path to industrial components.
Using their Vibenite materials, they’ve made possible a Vibenite Nucleation Net Zone (VNNZ), which makes for easier bonding of cast iron to Vibenite 480, the company’s 66 HRC cemented carbide material. The VNNZ makes it easier to cast these parts. What the company is now doing is to make parts out of traditional casting methods while using 3D printing for key wear areas in the casting mold. I love this very much. By using additive where it matters, the company is showing that wear is not evenly distributed across the entire functional areas of slurry pumps. Just as extra tips are sewn onto work gloves, this could point to broader applications of 3D printing in larger assemblies, where it would be too costly for the entire part or only make sense in these areas. Such approaches have often been overlooked because people want to print the entire part.
The company said that,
“Printing a nucleation net zone in Vibenite 480 is simple, yet it enables precise placement of the wear resistant material inside the mold at the most critical position significantly extending pump lifetime.”
“Without the VNNZ, molten cast iron tends to melt or intermix with the printed inserts, compromising both geometry and material performance. The VNNZ eliminates this issue, ensuring structural integrity and strong metallurgical bonding during casting.”
The company is now using this approach to print key wear areas in larger multi-meter-sized pumps. They say that the approach is cost-effective.
VBN Components CTO, Dr. Ulrik Beste, stated,
“This is an exciting development for our additive manufacturing technology. We are demonstrating how the superior wear resistance of Vibenite 480 can be integrated into large industrial components in a practical and scalable way—combining material performance with the design freedom of AM. It opens up significant new business opportunities.”
3D printing can seem so magical that we often look to those cases where we print an entire thing in a new way. And we often dream of directly manufactured parts, not necessarily intermediates or molds. Here we can really see that limiting ourselves to dealing only with the tip of the spear is a cost-effective way to leverage the technology. We want to print the whole golf club, and maybe we can, but then it will probably use several different materials and processes. What if we just print the club surface, where we can create the greatest value for the player? That approach cements the value. We should often be thinking about how we can get the greatest benefit while expensing the fewest layers. Thin, small, and short in the machine parts can be used to reap great rewards. By looking at where we add value and just how cheap we can make those parts that add value, or where vision is concentrated on the worthwhile. A printer can be seen as a box. It could be a box that could make most anything. That kind of broad vision is how many people have looked at 3D printing and its potential. But you could also see that box as capable of making things at a certain dollar amount per minute. And through that focused vision, you will see not the forest but the individual fruits that make sense to grow.
Images courtesy of VBN Components