Sintavia 3D prints massive metal heat exchanger on AMCM machine
The maritime part took 12 days of continuous printing
Florida-based Sintavia, a metal AM service provider focusing primarily on aerospace applications, recently completed the additive production of a massive metal heat exchanger, 3D printed on one of the company’s two internal AMCM M4K-4 metal 3D printer. The seawater heat exchangers is one of the largest single metal parts ever printed by PBF technology and certainly the largest 3D printed heat exchanger ever additively manufactured in metal.
The engineers at Sintavia were able to set up the parameters for a print job that took an impressive 12-days of continuous printing. However, without the 4-laser beam setup of the M4K-4 it could have taken significantly more time. The material uses is a nickel superalloy geared specifically for marine heat exchanger use, and the entire component has external dimensions of approximately 16” x 16” x 39” (about 400 x 400 x 1000 mm).
One of the benefits of designing scalable heat exchanger cores is that when your printers get larger, so do they. Besides the AMCM systems, Sintavia has also just ordered two NXG XII 12-laser systems from SLM Solutions, which are even larger, and faster. Sintavia said that the heat exchangers the company designed and printed can deliver up to 2X better heat transfer and up to 3X lower pressure drop than traditionally designed and manufactured versions—with more than 4X improvement in manufacturing yield.
These units are integral in cooling the maritime engines of tomorrow, and open up the way to multiple new possibilities in large format, highly intricate and complex metal parts, built by metal PBF technology. The company intends to continue to build its role as one of the premier manufacturers of advanced propulsion and thermodynamic systems for the aerospace, defense, and space industries.
