Back to MediaNorsk Titanium & QuesTek® Innovations Develop Nickel Alloy Wire Additive Manufacturing To Solve Supply Chain Issues
PARIS, FRANCE, June 20, 2023 — Norsk Titanium AS (Euronext: NTI, OTCQX: NORSF) and QuesTek® Innovations LLC (QuesTek) have announced a collaboration to advance the breakthrough use of nickel alloy wire in directed energy deposition (DED) additive manufacturing. This development effort provides manufacturers 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 collaborate with Norsk to accelerate the timeline for perfecting the use of nickel wire in additive manufacturing. 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,” says Norsk vice president of product development Nicholas Mayer. “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 be 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 the number of test cases needed to just a few.
“This is a very fitting challenge for QuesTek’s team of materials engineering experts and our ICMD® software platform,” says QuesTek business development director Jeff Grabowski. “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.
See how Norsk Titanium is innovating the future of metal at the 54th Paris Airshow June 19-23, Hall 3 Booth F42.
