I know this isn’t really a DIY question, but for those laser metal sintering printers that use metal powder…does anyone know how they make the metal powder in the first place? Is it ever recycled from other metal objects?
There are various shops that offer powdered metal. My guess is that it is simply ground up, much like the PET pulp which you can get. I built a simple grinder to recycle aluminum cans for a while (you can put a lot of aluminum in a box if it is ground up) until the recycle fee from Ca was better than the bulk recycle rate for aluminum. (more value to leave them as cans now).
But a more interesting question is this, why do you want to grind up metal? And what kind?
Getting a DMLS material is more complex than grinding up some material. Specific alloys are purposed for the application. Right now only a few have been fully vetted, a couple of types of stainless, inconel, a steel alloy and titanium though there may be one or two more. As the process becomes less expensive I’m sure we’ll see more development in materials for DMLS. One of the things Autodesk was going to focus on was getting new materials for sintering developed and I’m assuming to market.
@Chuck_McManis
I don’t personally want to, I was just wondering about the process.
Impact mills for the powder sizes typically used. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_mill
There’s been work on precipitation from solution for titanium. Goal is reducing total energy costs.
I used to work for a company that sold induction furnaces. A customer of ours used to make metal powders. The process involves pouring the molten metal into a high pressure stream of water. Fun to watch, but it’s definitly not something you should try at home. The same process is used to make steel shot for bead blasting.