In general, the ECAM process is actually a highly energy efficient means of manufacturing especially when compared with other metal AM techniques that use either a laser or furnace to thermally process the material. Specifically, there's quite a lot of energy that goes into making the metal powders that is avoided as the input to the ECAM system is a precursor material several steps upstream of a typical refined metal.

Fabric8Labs can print 100% density, whereas Desktop Metal is highly porous. Also Fabric8Labs can directly print pure copper, which has historically been very difficult. The process is also more energy efficient and better suited for small complex parts. Desktop Metal serves a different market in terms of material and size.

disclaimer: I'm a GP at Asimov Ventures and invested in Fabric8labs' pre-seed round.

Super interesting approach.

> "directly print pure copper, which has historically been very difficult"

SLM [1] has been able to 3D print Copper with precision down to the size of a mechanical pencil's lead for a long time already. In what way is ECAM better? Is it more precision + no need to handle powder + no need for laser source and containment - ECAM being slower, or am I missing some crucial feature?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_laser_melting

The high thermal conductivity of copper makes it difficult to maintain needed temperatures during SLM. Also, copper is prone to oxidation at high temperatures, further complicating (thermal based) laser melting 3D printing techniques. It’s more typical to print copper alloys than pure copper.

Those are solved issues.

> oxidation at high temperatures

SLM machines typically use an Argon gas chamber. DED machines use an Argon gas shield.

> It’s more typical to print copper alloys than pure copper.

In the context of modern SLM, it depends on your definition of "pure" and "alloy". During the process, a bit of resin to is mixed into the powder and heat treated in a final step to get to 99.9% pure copper.

edit: Just fixed up my knowledge. Indeed alloys are typically used (99% copper with things like Chrome added on depending on use-case), tough the pure copper can be used with higher laser power.

Printing pure copper (99.9%) is possible since years with SLM process using lasers with an appropriate wavelength

Any references for 99.9% density with SLM copper? My understanding is that pure copper SLM printing is less frequently done as doesn’t work well with the infrared lasers on most machines, requires high heat & speed, and has more porosity than other alloys. It’s also hard to print so that it’s strong, conductive and heat stable.

I think there’s still quite active research in the area, though, and no doubt there’s a lot going on that I don’t know! https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S026412752...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10861549/

Sorry I wasn't talking about density but the copper content of a powder which is printable. Googling a bit I found this presentation from 2022 showing that a density of 99.5% for pure copper is possible although at half the productivity of a copper alloy https://www.coppercouncil.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/TS2...

> doesn’t work well with the infrared lasers

The copper use-case is what kick-ed off an industry-wide race towards offering blue laser as an option. There is more than just wavelength that goes into printing good copper results, but that is a major factor.

in general electrolytic processes are very energy-intensive, and i'm sure fabric8labs's process is no exception

Interesting! Can you reference some numbers? Other processes such as SLM and DED require a powerful laser, starting from 3000W. When talking about copper specifically and especially when wanting higher processes speed, you need higher wavelength blue laser reaching 10000W of power. But on the flipside, the process can be quite quick. Non-laser alternatives like Metal Paste Deposition need a furnace, though I'm unsure of the power requirements there.

Any idea or references on how ECAM would compare to that?

every metal atom requires two electrons (or three for some metals), and you typically need 1–3 volts, and sometimes there are side reactions that waste most of your electrons; probably 'faradaic efficiency' or 'coulombic efficiency' is the term to google

slm and ded and metal paste deposition just have to rearrange some crystal structures; in electrolysis (including ecm machining) and electrodeposition you have to actually rip molecules apart, atom by atom and electron by electron

basically you're charging a battery, so you can get a rough idea by thinking about how much energy a battery could store if it was the same size as your desired workpiece

Based on the graph the process is producing way less CO2 than other additive processes. Being low temperature this intuitively seems a credible claim. Maybe you are concerned about high currents which is true but since voltage is low that does not multiply to much.

It's because that chart is measuring end-to-end energy use. Other metal printing approaches require a lot of energy to make the metal powders, so when you include that the other approaches are a lot worse.

it's an interesting point; you do of course have to add those electrons to the metal atoms in the first place when you're smelting it from ore, unless you're working from a rare native metal deposit, and plausibly you could leach metal ions out of ore and feed them into your 3-d printer. i suspect that the tests they've done so far, however, are using reagent-grade metal salts from sigma-aldrich or similar with much more embodied energy than metallurgical-grade copper or whatever