Additive manufacturing of complex pure copper parts via binder jetting

Copper has due to its outstanding properties, such as high electrical conductivity, heat conduction and ductility, a high industrial and economic significance. Today this material is essential in the entire electrical industry and predestined for industrial applications such as electromagnetic coil systems or high-performance heat exchangers with a highly complex, functionally optimized design. Conventional manufacturing processes are often limited due to their inherent design restrictions. This offers a high potential for additive manufacturing (AM). Currently, the relative densities of generated copper parts are in the range between 40 % and 85 %. However, this is often insufficient for potential industrial applications, especially when high electrical or thermal conductivities are demanded. The 3D-Printing of these materials could be used to develop tailor-made coil systems for the induction of precisely individualized magnetic fields and research into new, highly efficient heat exchangers. For beam-based additive manufacturing processes, such as laser powder beam fusion (LPBF), the high thermal conductivity and low absorption coefficient of copper, in the typical wavelength range of conventional beam sources, represent a major processing challenge. Due to the low technology costs and the high throughput, Binder Jetting offers the potential to outperform many other additive manufacturing processes in the processing of copper. The aim of this work is to process copper into complex geometries and components with high densities. Especially with regard to the low porosity of the additive produced solids, there is a great need for research. We propose to overcome this challenge by modifying the binder and powder compositions.