Properties of Additive Manufactured Hardmetal Components produced by Fused Filament Fabrication (FFF)

Additive Manufacturing (AM) is experiencing an upswing in many sectors of industry for a broad variety of materials. Processes are mainly developed for polymers and metals. For ceramics and especially hardmetals there are only a few additive processes suitable to produce dense and defect free parts. Fused Filament Fabrication (FFF) is one of the suitable processes, which can be used for the fabrication of hardmetal parts via printing of green parts and consequent sintering. Within this study FFF of different hardmetal compositions representing different Co binder contents and different WC grain sizes are investigated. Main points of this investigation are the adjustment of debindering using different thermal and non-thermal steps and the adjustment of sintering regime. It is shown that FFF is a suitable AM technique for production of hardmetal parts with different compositions and microstructures. Dense parts with magnetic and mechanical properties as conventional produced hardmetals can be achieved. It is shown that with the Fused Filament Fabrication fully dense and defect free hardmetals parts can be produced. Because of the thermoplastic processability of the filaments which can be highly filled with particles this technique is interesting for manufacturing hardmetal parts.