A research collaboration between University of Huddersfield scientists (www.hud.ac.uk) and Huddersfield-based Reliance Precision — a specialist engineering firm — is set to add a whole new dimension to 3-D printing.

Intricate high-strength components for the aerospace industry and medical implants are among the products that could be made more speedily and economically as a result of research that aims to harness the potential of particle beams during the additive-manufacturing process.

Reliance Precision (www.reliance.co.uk) has teamed up with the university’s Jaap Van Den Berg — whose specialities include ion beam technology — for two successive projects that have earned funding from Innovate UK.

These projects have been key elements of Reliance’s programme to develop a new generation of electron beam additive-manufacturing (EBAM) machines that will enable much wider adoption of this form of 3-D printing, in which metal powder is placed under a vacuum and fused together by heat from a high-energy electron beam.

It is a technique that enables the production of highly complex components, building them up layer by layer.

The first project — named RAMP-UP — has been concluded and led to the development of technology that greatly reduces the need for the powder used during AM to undergo a time-consuming and costly process of preparation known as pre-sintering.

This has been immediately followed by the two-year INSPIRE project; this is intended to make pre-sintering completely unnecessary and enable metal powder to be recycled — and re-used by an EBAM system.

This will mean that the technology becomes more economic and productive — and therefore more widely adopted, fully realising its potential.

Professor Van Den Berg envisages that when the technology is more widely available, it will find new uses in a wide variety of sectors.