Cold Metal Fusion (CMF), developed by the start-up company Headmade Materials, is an innovative technology that enables the additive manufacturing (AM) of metal parts with high precision and significantly reduced manufacturing costs. The key component in the CMF chain is the material feedstock, which consists of a highly metal-filled polymer matrix supplied as a powder. The feedstock can hereby be processed into green parts using standard machines for the selective laser sintering (SLS) of polymer materials. This leads to a significant reduction in investment and overall production costs compared to metal powder production, without compromising on geometric accuracy or design freedom. Figure 1 shows the schematics of the cold metal fusion process.

After printing in the SLS process, the green parts must be removed from the powder cake. In addition, thorough cleaning of all powder residues is required. The possibility of subjecting "green parts" to a surface treatment leads, among other things, to a reduction in costs, as the need for expensive and time-consuming surface treatment of metal parts no longer exists. Additionally, compared with metal powder based AM, no direct support structures on the parts are required which need to be removed. The post processed green parts are debinded with a solvant to produce brown parts with minimal left binder residue. The brown parts are sintered under high temperature to produce a metal part.
While the automation of depowdering processes and the surface treatment of metal parts has been the focus of interest for many companies and researchers in recent years, an automated process for CMF is currently lacking. The green parts have limited mechanical stability, which is an advantage for surface treatment, but at the same time represents a major hurdle for depowdering and automated handling processes. AM Solutions, a Brand of the Rösler Group, and the research institute Neue Materialien Bayreuth GmbH have teamed up with Headmade Materials as part of the publicly funded “Autosmooth” project to overcome this challenge. The aim of the project is therefore to develop an automated prototype for the depowdering, cleaning and surface finishing of CMF parts with maximum feedstock recovery. Automation paves the way for series production of CMF due to improved reproducibility and the avoidance of labor costs. The “Autosmooth” project and its initial results are presented in this presentation.