For the past decade, voices have been heard exclaiming of a crisis in rare earths.Now, with Chinese restrictions on the exports of Rare Earths, a crisis foretold a thousand times has come to pass.Is there perhaps a role that 3D printing can play to alleviate this crisis? In some surprising ways, 3D printing may help to mitigate the pain of Rare Earths withdrawal.
What are Rare Earths? And Why Do We Care? Meltio’s wire-laser Directed Energy Deposition (DED) technology.Image courtesy of Meltio Rare Earth Elements are not earths and not rare.They are a group of very chemically similar metals that took a long time to classify and identify.
They’re not easily found by using a loupe, but now we know that they’re abundant and among the most prevalent, widely distributed substances on Earth.They have particular properties which make them uniquely suited for some very specific industrial applications.Neodymium can easily be used to create super-powerful magnets, while being easy to sinter and having a high melting point.
Scandium is a metal that burns easily and reacts with water and air.As an alloying agent, it is incredibly powerful.In 3D printing for example, it’s in Scalmalloy and many (usually) aluminum alloys that we use.
Scandium is also on the cutting edge of thin films, electronics, fuel cells, batteries, coatings, and more.Cerium is in catalytic converters and a component of 316 and other stainless steels, while yttrium is used for Yag lasers, as well as fiber lasers; both these are used in additive.Holmium is used for lasers, missiles, nuclear power, nuclear medicine, motors, and electric vehicles, and samarium is used in high-end actuation, satellites, MRI machines, and pacemakers.
Gadolinium helps shield nuclear reactors, while Lutetium is used in nuclear medicine and PET scanners.On the whole, their uses in permanent magnets, batteries, wind turbines, turbo machinery, electric vehicles (broadly), defense, alloying and nuclear applications make Rare Earth Elements a gateway material.Any path to the future seems to pass by these 17 materials.
And if you look at things like nuclear missiles, defense, aircraft engines, actuation and vehicles, any war in the future will likely consume an enormous amount of these elements.And without war, the energy transition will see a sixfold increase in REE use.Rare in the Foie Gras Sense MIT researchers modified a multi-material 3D printer so it could produce three-dimensional solenoids in one step by layering ultrathin coils of three different materials.
It prints a U.S.quarter-sized solenoid as a spiral by layering material around the soft magnetic core, with thicker conductive layers separated by thin insulating layers.Credit: Massachusetts Institute of Technology So if they’re not rare, what is all the fuss about? China essentially has cornered the market for these materials, producing over 90% of them.
Yes, they’re all over, but they’re often mixed in with things like uranium or other materials.Huge amounts of earth have to be dug up to find them, and refining them takes vast quantities of nasty chemicals; common materials used for this include tributyl phosphate.Common processing techniques involve essentially making lakes of toxic cancer-causing chemicals to leech out the interesting material, and perhaps leaving thorium or the processing agents behind in groundwater.
To give you an idea of the scale of this problem, “For every ton of rare earth produced, the mining process yields 13kg of dust, 9,600-12,000 cubic meters of waste gas, 75 cubic meters of wastewater, and one ton of radioactive residue.” One tonne of radioactive material per ton of rare earths.And, “Overall, for every ton of rare earth, 2,000 tons of toxic waste are produced.” These are insanely environmentally detrimental materials that are the highest performance options for many future applications necessary for economic growth.It’s almost like a sick joke on capitalism and our stewardship of the planet by a jaded creator.
With its eyes squarely on the future, China eyed these materials as a potential leverage mechanism many decades ago.At the same time, the country knew that it would be hard to extract these materials in, let’s say, Germany, so its dictatorship and focus as a nation could give it a unique advantage here in pursuing a long-term opportunity that would not be possible to entertain in democracies.At the same time, this opportunity would let it build an industry in batteries, electric motors, wind energy, and high-tech alloys; all things that have exciting dual uses in military development.
Furthermore, the country would be poised to win the future through verticality, controlling the best ways to expend energy.This is, therefore, a completely rational realpolitik plan, albeit an environmentally destructive one.And it is a plan that is working: BYD grows, CATL dominates in batteries, and China is ascendant in wind energy and beyond.
Barren Lands Near Rare Earth mines, vegetables will no longer grow, animals die off, and cancers proliferate.Other countries can mine these elements too, but so far, few have much appetite for it.China exports around 70,368 tonnes of rare earths each year, leaving behind 140,736,000 tonnes of toxic waste.
The cost of Ukraine’s Rare Earths deal with the US is therefore potentially more enormous than many realize.As 3D printing firms, we may yet help with a transition towards other materials that are less damaging.3D Printing Alternatives One option is to 3D print rare earth structures and components so they need less material to function well.
We can also optimize the functioning of low-performance materials by changing the properties and geometry of components so that higher performance can equal or approach that of Rare Earths.We could perhaps use 3D printing to 3D print permanent magnets that replace the functionality of Rare Earths.There is research going on in this arena, with people looking to recycle materials into 3D printing magnets, while bound filament magnets from TU Wien also could provide an alternative, as could magnets made with vat polymerization.
Through microstructure optimization, we can also perhaps make higher-performance magnets.We could also complete topology optimization to match needs with performance.Hairpin winding for electric motor made with 3D printing.
Image courtesy of Additive Drives.Additive Drives makes 3D printed electric motors, which could optimize coilings and performance to reduce the need for Rare Earths.Others have looked at Direct Ink Writing, powder bed fusion, and other AM processes for magnet production.
We can also produce actuators entirely using 3D printing to optimize performance and reduce rare earths.Researchers and Domin are doing work in that field.We could also relatively quickly develop novel alloys using additive itself.
Through this process, specifically interesting alloys, without the offending Rare Earths, could be used for certain specific applications.Technologies such as Metalysis could be used to skip a few steps and make high-end alloys locally.Meanwhile, 6K, Metal Powder Works, and Continuum Powders could be used to recycle old planes and other things into 3D printing powder that doesn’t need new Rare Earths in it.
We can replace metal components with high-performance polymer components made out of materials like PAEKs.Composites can also be used to replace metal components.If companies would need new tooling or new local production moving away from Rare Earths, then 3D printing could play a role in developing this tooling.
Since Rare Earths themselves are made through sintering and pressing processes, we could even sinter optimized components directly while optimizing microstructure.This, done with binder jet or powder bed, could optimize performance even further.In molding or pressing, and perhaps even in precipitation-like processes, 3D printed components can also optimize production.
ORNL labs commercialized a magnet recycling process for hard drives in 2016.Using additive, we can perhaps aid in quickly making inexpensive disassembly lines that use robots to take apart things like hard drives.This may make magnet recycling more attractive.
On the whole, we can see a number of very specific and attractive opportunities that exist for the additive manufacturing industry with regard to Rare Earths.The most commercially exciting opportunities lie in creating a direct magnet production technology in permanent magnets, either out of metals or polymers.New processes for topology optimization of existing magnets and increasing the performance of magnets through changing microstructure could also have a global impact.
New magnetic materials that can lead to new magnet geometries and processes in conformal magnet creation could also be the basis for industrialization.Bound filament magnets could be a very inexpensive path to magnet production.Better batteries and electric motors will always be an interesting proposition.
Recycling magnets more efficiently will also be of high interest.Generally, we can see that our industry, through lightweighting and making things more efficient, reduces the need for Rare Earth Elements.But, more specifically, there are several paths where we could help resolve reliance on Rare Earths.
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