Metal 3D printing tech developed for fusion energy gains popularity.

Metal 3D printing company Seurat Technologies has received orders for 25 tons of metal printed parts. In addition to surpassing the capacity of its pilot facility, the company says this level of interest demonstrates a historic shift for a metal printing technology born from the quest for fusion energy.

Founded in 2015, Seurat Technologies was the product of the development of a new kind of metal 3D printing method that could help manufacture the components necessary to house the two-million-joule lasers that the National Ignition Facility uses for its fusion energy experimentation.

"The chamber that houses this reaction (nuclear fusion) needs to be able to withstand intense temperature swings and transfer the energy out of the chamber to make electricity," Seurat penned in its company origin story. "The space essentially needs to house a sun. As you can imagine, the stresses on the fusion chamber walls are brutal – every laser shot causes a multi-hundred-degree temperature fluctuation in the wall."

Due to the incredible stress loads that a miniature Dyson sphere needed, NIF sought solutions different from the age-old manufacturing methods, as materials able to withstand nearly 1,100 degrees Fahrenheit were only a handful at the time.

"A material was finally found that met these extreme requirements – a very specialized steel that uses nanoparticles to give it high-temperature strength," the company noted. "Unfortunately, this material was unweldable. This was a big problem since the chamber needed to be twelve meters across. The walls themselves needed to be two meters thick, and with lots of internal structures, they could only be made by welding smaller sections together to make the whole structure."

As you can imagine, this process was inevitably extremely time-consuming, costly, inefficient, and prone to failure due to the inconsistencies of welding. However, a new type of manufacturing had been floating around for some time by then, which led the researchers to pursue this avenue of production.

"It became clear that the best way to manufacture these structures was through a type of Additive Manufacturing (AM or 3D Printing) called Laser Powder Bed Fusion (L-PBF)," Seurat continued.

"L-PBF had been demonstrated to be technically capable of processing the special type of steel and meeting the mechanical property requirements needed for such an intense environment. The problem with L-PBF however, is that it is extremely slow. The fastest available machine in the world, even today, would take nearly two hundred years to print just a single fusion chamber at the resolution needed."

Clearly, no one wants to wait 200 more years for the possibility of near-limitless energy, and this was especially so for Seurat co-founder James DeMuth.

"This problem drove me, along with my co-inventors Bassem El-Dasher, Andy Bayramian, Joe Farmer, and Sharon Torres, to work to understand the fundamental barrier preventing Additive Manufacturing from scaling," DeMuth wrote. "Together, we figured out how to remove that barrier and devised a system that could scale to have a high enough throughput to manufacture these chambers in a reasonable timeframe."

Pixelating fusion lasers

For DeMuth and the team, the answer to the solution was hiding in plain sight.

"It turned out, the answer was already being developed at LLNL (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) in parallel," the 3D metal printing CEO continued. "The project, titled LEOPARD, created a device called an Optically Addressed Light Valve (OALV). The OALV allowed for the NIF laser beam to be patterned with high-resolution images that could be programmed to block or let light through each one of its 'pixels.' Every pixel in the OALV defined its own laser spot, effectively creating a multitude of individual lasers out of one very powerful laser."

Over the next five years, DeMuth and partners would work to develop a less-than-five-kilowatt laser system to incorporate a NIF OALV. By fundamentally siphoning down the potency of powerful lasers, Seurat's system demonstrated that it could project laser light down to a bed of metal powder, weld a patterned area in an instant, and build a multi-layer part using this technique.

This system architecture was the solution, essentially opening endless possibilities for additive manufacturing.

With this new technique, the ability to operate with millions of laser spots simultaneously became possible. Printed feature resolution was no longer tied to the overall laser beam size. Instead, resolution and laser power could be separately engineered to satisfy the requirements of the system.

"I met my soon-to-be co-founder, Erik Toomre, early on in 2015," DeMuth continued. "We shared grand visions for what a future could hold with the advent of a scalable manufacturing process. After many late nights, on May 23rd, 2015, I proved this method: now called Area Printing, to be capable, and first demonstrated melting metal. Soon thereafter on July 2nd, Erik and I co-founded Seurat. By January 2016, we had secured the technology license from LLNL and began fundraising and commercializing the technology."

Area printing demand

Seurat Technology Oct. 6 announced three letters of intent from global manufacturers that link production volumes to revenue forecasts.

Essentially, these agreements total roughly 25 tons of metal parts, which goes well beyond the current manufacturing capacity of Seurat's pilot facility and will require expansion into additional full-scale production factories.

Applications range from tooling, energy, transportation, and more. Due to this demand, Seurat hopes to begin high-volume manufacturing next year.

"Manufacturing must be closer to the customer," said DeMuth. "Having products produced in a faraway factory has clearly failed to be the best economic and environmental approach. Our novel Area Printing process can scale to outcompete traditional manufacturing in every way – cost, quality, and volume, while also reducing our dependence on dirty fossil fuels."

Seurat hopes to circumvent backlog with its first production factory, estimated at roughly 100,000 square feet and capable of manufacturing more than 500 tons of metal parts per year.

To be built in the Boston area and powered by 100% green energy, Seurat's all-electric area printing technology could quickly position itself as a leader of more than just manufacturing, but of green manufacturing.

"High volume orders of this magnitude are historic for the 3D metal printing industry and a tremendous step forward for the decarbonization of manufacturing," DeMuth added.

As manufacturing is one the today's largest greenhouse gas emitters, contributing roughly 22% of total emissions in the U.S. alone, excluding the impact of shipping those parts afterward, Seurat is planning ahead.

This has also caught the attention of numerous automakers, including German-based automobile powerhouse Volkswagen.

"Seurat's factory deployment model enables contract manufacturing to happen closer to the customer which is highly attractive to the auto industry," said Gero Corman, head of digital innovation for group production at Volkswagen AG. "Seurat's 3D printing process has the potential to produce high volume parts at cost-parity to overseas manufacturing which will provide tremendous relief to supply chains."

While the present global manufacturing economy is estimated at $14.2 trillion, additive manufacturing only occupies approximately 0.1% of that, according to the 2022 Wohler's Report. Seurat, however, estimates that with its area printing technology, it would enable access to the $2.5 trillion metal parts manufacturing market.

In the end, additive manufacturing has been an alternative for high-value applications in niche markets; thus, it has had a limited scope of influence. With the push to lower the carbon footprint and localize supply chains, however, metal 3D printing is emerging as a major force in manufacturing.