Norsk and QuesTek enter nickel alloy wire AM collaboration
Providing manufacturers with an alternative to castings for large aerospace and industrial components
Norsk Titanium and QuesTek Innovations have entered a collaboration to advance the breakthrough use of nickel alloy wire in directed energy deposition (DED) additive manufacturing. This development effort provides manufacturers with an alternative to castings for large aerospace and industrial components – bypassing significant supply chain delays and shortening long lead times.
Materials engineering leader QuesTek will work with Norsk to accelerate the timeline for perfecting the use of nickel wire in AM. Using their ICMD materials engineering software platform, QuesTek will model the full range of potential heat treatment temperatures and times that will yield the necessary properties – including strength and corrosion resistance.
Norsk Titanium AS, a global leader in metal 3D printing, will apply the QuesTek modeling to their proprietary Rapid Plasma Deposition (RPD) technology and provide real-world test results to their end customer – rapidly advancing the technology readiness level of the alloy. Applying Norsk’s innovative process to a nickel-based wire will open new applications and components that can be manufactured quickly, without the need for lengthy and expensive casting development.
“Our customer contacted us to ask if we would be willing to tackle this problem in support of a US government need. With our partner QuesTek, we are ready to rise to the occasion,” said Nicholas Mayer, Vice President of Product Development at Norsk. “We reached out to QuesTek to support the tight timelines. Their modeling capability allows us to dramatically reduce the amount of traditional testing that would be required to develop the additive parameters and subsequent heat treatment.”
The optimal heat treatment could be anywhere within a several-hundred-degree range and with a potential duration of less than an hour, or more than a day. Using traditional trial-and-error methods might require dozens of test cases, which would be costly, time-consuming, and not feasible on components this large. Drawing on data from decades of experience in modeling materials, including nickel alloys, QuesTek will use ICMD to significantly narrow down the number of test cases needed.
“This is a very fitting challenge for QuesTek’s team of materials engineering experts and our ICMD software platform,” said Jeff Grabowski, Business Development Director at QuesTek. “We look forward to working with Norsk’s team to advance the boundaries of additive manufacturing as quickly as possible to remove delays in the industrial supply chain and provide an urgent solution to the government.”
Norsk and QuesTek previously collaborated in 2018 and 2019 on titanium alloys for Norsk’s RPD process that targeted increased light weighting and component life.
