Honeywell Aerospace has added VELO3D to its partners portfolio. The aerospace specialist plans to qualify the Sapphire™ Metal 3D Printer of the US-based manufacturer and make it a reliable manufacturing platform for the production of aircraft parts.

Honeyell Aerospace is a true advocate of AM technologies. The company builds up extensive expertise through partnership with various players of the industry including Sintavia & SLM Solutions.

The interest for the Sapphire™ system comes from its ability to deliver complex geometries without the requirement of support structures. The manufacturer recently unveiled a Quality Management System to help users detect process anomalies, flags them, and warns of the corrective actions to achieve during the production, but nothing is mentioned regarding the use of this technology as part of this qualification phase.

However, the qualification process has already started in Honeywell Aerospace’s Phoenix facility and focuses on a nickel-based super alloy named INCONEL.  The material seems to be the ideal candidate for extreme temperatures. VELO3D will develop suitable parameter sets to complete material qualification utilizing the Sapphire system and achieve optimal material properties.

“We are qualifying VELO3D’s Sapphire system with the aim of printing geometries that can’t be fabricated on existing 3D metal printers. Their technology will help Honeywell develop new production-part applications while also meeting our material requirements for qualification,” said Dr. Söeren Wiener, senior director of technology and advanced operations for Honeywell Aerospace. “We intend to qualify this equipment through repeatability testing in our production environment, including build and post-processing, to generate an acceptable set of material property data and qualification of flight hardware.”

Both companies plan to complete the qualification process by the third quarter of this year.

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