Interest for the third-most-consumed industrial metal in the world continues to gain traction. Infinite Flex, a Germany-based producer of smart materials, has developed a pure copper powder for industrial SLM 3D printing.
Despite its popularity across manufacturing industries, pure copper remains tough to process in AM because of the strong reflection of the laser radiation in the machine and the high thermal conductivity of the material.
“So far, various copper alloys such as CuCrZr or CuNiSiCr have been used; with mediocre results. These copper alloys exhibit significantly lower conductivity properties than pure copper. For example, CuCrZr achieves an electrical conductivity of at best 70% of pure copper and the conductivity of CuNiSiCr is even worse (24 MS/m or around 40% of the value of pure copper)” Infinite Flex explains in a press release.
The new INFINITE POWDER Cu 01 addresses these issues. Following several tests on standard SLM systems, SLM systems from EOS (EOS M290) and Trumpf (TruPrint 1000) especially, the company confirms that the properties of its new material deliver advantages for the additive manufacturing production of highly conductive copper components.
Those properties are outlined in the table below:
High-end applications that can be made possible with pure copper include heat exchangers, induction coils and components in the electronics industry and we can’t wait for Infinite Flex to share them with us.
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