maximus otter
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Earlier this month, a Navy ship called the USS Essex received an enormous printer. The printer and the large gray box it is housed in—together weighing some 15,000 pounds—were hoisted onto the ship, via crane, in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The printer doesn’t print in ink. It prints using hot liquid metal, making it a small aluminum fabrication facility in a box.
The printer, called the ElemX, is made by Xerox. It measures 9 feet wide and 7 feet tall, and will remain in its roughly 20-foot-long conex storage box while deployed on the Essex. It weighs about 4,630 pounds alone, and needs a power supply of 480 volts.
The material it prints with is aluminum, and it consumes aluminum wire as the raw material.
“The wire gets fed into the heated print head. The print head gets to 850 Celsius [1,564 Fahrenheit], which essentially melts the wire, so you get this liquid pool of metal,” says Tali Rosman, the head of Elem Additive at Xerox. “And then we activate pulses on the print head, and eject [metal], drop by drop, to build the part.”
The type of objects that want to fabricate using this printer are pretty straightforward. The idea is to be able to create items that might come in handy at sea when a stop at a hardware store would be logistically inconvenient. “They want to make relatively simple parts that break on a ship often,” says Rosman.
https://www.popsci.com/technology/navy-ship-gets-large-metal-printer/
maximus otter
The printer, called the ElemX, is made by Xerox. It measures 9 feet wide and 7 feet tall, and will remain in its roughly 20-foot-long conex storage box while deployed on the Essex. It weighs about 4,630 pounds alone, and needs a power supply of 480 volts.
The material it prints with is aluminum, and it consumes aluminum wire as the raw material.
“The wire gets fed into the heated print head. The print head gets to 850 Celsius [1,564 Fahrenheit], which essentially melts the wire, so you get this liquid pool of metal,” says Tali Rosman, the head of Elem Additive at Xerox. “And then we activate pulses on the print head, and eject [metal], drop by drop, to build the part.”
The type of objects that want to fabricate using this printer are pretty straightforward. The idea is to be able to create items that might come in handy at sea when a stop at a hardware store would be logistically inconvenient. “They want to make relatively simple parts that break on a ship often,” says Rosman.
https://www.popsci.com/technology/navy-ship-gets-large-metal-printer/
maximus otter
