铝具有有趣的历史，但证明材料的3D打印已被证明是有问题的。
Guests of Napoleon III could expect to eat from gold or silver plates, while aluminum was reserved for Emperor and later President of France. Aluminum’s prohibitive cost of production was also deemed to make it suitable for crowning the Washington Monument.
Once the Bayer and Hall-Herout processes for the industrial scale production of aluminum were perfected, the cost tumbled and now the metal is one of the most common on the planet – with a price to match.
The majority of metal additive manufacturing technologies work with expensive spherical metal powders, one of the reasons one why metal 3D printing remains beyond the reach of many enterprises. While efforts are underway to降低金属添加剂制造的成本雷电竞充值，2017年对现状面临许多挑战。
Research from the theState University of New York, Buffaloand,蒙特利尔的康科迪亚大学着眼于提高一种新型添加剂制造雷电竞充值method called liquid metal 3D printing – a process that can work with aluminum and other metals.
10x faster at 1/10th of the cost as compared to current metal 3D printing techniques
NAMRC在第45届中小企业北美制造研究会议上发表的一项研究作者写道：“most of the current metal 3D printing applications involve high cost and lowspeed metal powder sintering or melting。”
提议替代金属添加剂制造方法的企业包括桌面金属，标记和雷电竞充值3deo。这些公司将基于金属注塑成型（MIM）方法带到3D打印行业。很快，其他企业也将加入使用MIM粉。
但是，Vader Systems解决方案采用了不同的方法。在2016年在芝加哥举行的国际制造技术展（IMTS）期间，我了解了有关商业化的更多信息联合创始人Zach Vader的世界第一台使用专有液体金属喷气打印（LMJP）的熔融金属3D打印机。
LMJP金属3D打印方法使用集成的熔化和喷墨，以实现作者所说的速度，在成本的1/10速度中快10倍。此外， ”molten solid metal in LMJP rather than sintered powder leads to dense metal parts with much finer micro-structure that have 30% or greater increase in ultimate tensile strength。”
监视喷气式液体金属的行为
However, LMJP is not without drawbacks. The authors write, “the jetting process may be influenced by many uncertain factors, which imposes a significant challenge to its process stability and product quality。” Such factors include variations in air pressure that can cause the drops of liquid metal to land in the wrong place.
To address these challenges the scientists developed an原位droplet inspection and control system. They describe the system as follows,
We present a closed-loop control mechanism using vision technique to inspect droplet behaviours. This system automatically tunes the drive voltage applied to compensate the uncertain influence based on vision inspection result. To realize this, we first extract multiple features and properties from both frozen and dynamic images to capture the droplet behaviour. Second, we use a voting-based decision making technique to determine how the drive voltage should be adjusted.
The researchers note that LMJP is still at an early stage and their work is based on a simulation due to limited access to LMJP prototypes. Furthermore, the 3D printed metal parts seen by 3D Printing Industry still have some way to go before they could be mistaken for an EBM or DMLS fabricated component. On the other hand, Selective Laser Melting does have a twenty-plus year headstart on LMJP.
研究论文，“液态金属喷气机3D打印过程的原位液滴检查和控制系统” by Tianjiao Wanga, Tsz-Ho Kwokb, and Chi Zhoua is availablehere。
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特色图像显示了IMT的Vader Systems摊位。迈克尔·皮奇（Michael Petch）的照片。
