UniJet™ 17-4PH Stainless Steel Powder

Uniformity Labs, a producer of engineered materials for advanced manufacturing, announces the availability of its ultra-low porosity UniJet™ 17-4PH stainless steel powder for the Desktop Metal Shop Pro Binder Jetting (BJT) platform, an advanced metal powder that delivers superior material properties, sintered part geometric accuracy, process yield and print uniformity at highest throughput. Developed by an in-house team of world-leading materials scientists and 3D printing innovators, Uniformity Labs’ ultra-low porosity UniJet™ 17-4 PH powders exhibit a typical Tap Density of 5.33 ± 0.05 g/cm3. In an industry-first, Uniformity Labs provides insight into the geometric uniformity of parts throughout the part production cycle and considering all factors within a typical spread, print, cure, de-powder, and sinter. A high and highly repeatable Sintered Density of 7.68± 0.03 g/cm3 and in-print brown density deviation of +/- 0.024 g/cm3 delivers uniform sintering shrinkage across the bed. Brown density across prints, batches, and in-spec process and environmental parameters averages 4.49 +/- 0.05g/cm3, delivering at better than 95% confidence levels inclusive of batch-to-batch, spread, print, cure, de-powder, and sinter sources of variation, a highly uniform sintering shrinkage of 15.17% ± 0.65% in the X direction, 15.66% ± 0.65% in the Y direction and 18.18% ± 0.63% in the Z direction. This low and unusually stable shrinkage allows the manufacture via binder jetting of large parts, up to 10s of cms in length. The process stability reported is enabled by the low cohesion, low porosity powder that repeatably spreads uniformly across the build bed. The high brown densities result in up to 50% reduction in linear shrinkage relative to competitor materials and repeatably deliver 99-100% final part density for best-in-class materials properties. An additional benefit of low shrinkage is increased printer throughput due to greater use of the build volume.