NativeCAD · metal 3D printing prep

From a CAD file to a ready-to-print metal build plate in under two minutes.

Drag the model. That is a jet-engine turbine vane on the build plate, standing on supports NativeCAD placed by itself.

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partsupportslattice275 x 275 mm build plate Drag to turn, pinch or scroll to zoom.

116 sfrom the vane's CAD file to a finished plate

288ways to stand it up, all scored

11supports, none on the surfaces the hot gas flows over

94.8 %of overhangs held up, measured by a separate checker

Metal printing, in one breath

Laser powder-bed fusion spreads a layer of metal powder 40 microns thick (about half a hair), melts that slice of the part with a laser, and repeats. This vane takes 3,444 layers.

Anything that hangs out over loose powder needs a support under it, or it sags and warps. Supports are cut and ground off by hand afterwards, so where they touch the part matters as much as whether they hold it.

Where the supports go is the whole game

Our first pass

It stacked the two vanes and grew a support wall almost 5 cm tall between them, right across the airfoils. Those are the surfaces you would then have to grind clean and inspect.

We had written a checker that measures the finished plate from its triangles and shares no code with the generator. It failed that plate on 4 counts. Take the wall away and only 43 % of the overhangs had anything under them.

Now

The vane is built trailing edge down and tilted. All 11 supports stand on the build plate and touch only the trailing-edge strip, the rails and the back faces of the bands: where a print engineer would put them. Nothing touches the airfoils.

The same checker measures 94.8 % of the overhangs held up, just short of our 95 % target. The 16 mm² left sit beside the airfoil fillets and over one rail, where the only way in would be to touch the gas path. So we leave them, and say so.

Which way up, picked for you

The angle a part is printed at decides how many supports it needs, how tall the build is and how much it may warp. NativeCAD scored 288 orientations for the vane and kept the best.

Standing it upright looked tidy, but it left thousands of square millimetres of airflow surface hanging over powder, with nothing allowed to touch them. It was scored and rejected.

A whole plate, with the hours

Turbine vane

Nickel superalloy (IN718). Prepped in 116 s. One vane prints in 22.6 machine hours; four fit on a plate in 48.9 h, 12.2 h each.

Cooled liner

A double-walled cooling band with a 4,640-strut lattice inside. No supports at all: its cone holds itself up. It is fused to the plate on 0.5 mm of spare stock that a wire EDM (a cutting wire) slices through after heat treatment. Prepped in 41 s; a 35.7 h build.

Brackets

20 titanium (Ti64) brackets laid out 9 to a plate on 3 plates, in 11 s. A full plate is 60.6 machine hours, 6.7 h a bracket.

Hours are machine time from a 3D Systems DMP Flex 350 profile (275 x 275 mm plate). Out come the plate as 3MF, every part and support as its own STL in machine coordinates, layer slices and a build report. The plate then goes to the printer maker's software for the last step: laser settings and scan paths.

Hours by quantity