The use of electron beam welding for additive manufacturing was first developed by Vivek Davé in 1995 as part of his PhD thesis at MIT.
A team at NASA Langley Research Center (LaRC) led by Karen Taminger developed the process, calling it electron beam freeform fabrication (EBF3).
The aviation industry has the most potential for the procedure, say experts at the NASA LaRC, because significant progress should be made in reducing machining waste byproducts.
Typically, an aircraft maker would start with a 6,000-pound block of titanium and use thousands of liters of cutting fluid to reduce it to a 300-pound item, leaving 5,700 pounds of material that needed to be recycled.
The EBF3 process is scalable for components from fractions of an inch to tens of feet, limited mainly by the size of the vacuum chamber and the amount of wire feedstock available.