Metal Powder Cooling Shroud

Defining Project Requirements, 3D Design & Analysis, Procurement, and Testing

  • Strengths demonstrated: Mechanical design, design for manufacturing, FEA Simulations, CFD
  • Tools used: SolidWorks, Ansys
  • School Team: University of Toronto CACT Laboratory
  • Project date: 2020 - 2021

What?
The Center for Advanced Coating Technologies (CACT) is looking to create a new stream of revenue by producign and selling metal powder for metal 3D printing, however to meet the specifications for metal 3D printing, they required a reactor that produced powder to a higher specification.

How?
As the team lead, I sugested first to create a proof of concept and then perfect that concept. We manually created a tube to pass pure nitrogen gas into the reactor to reduce oxidation of the metal powder and cool it at the same time, resulting in greater atomization of the powder. This proved effective, we then moved to SolidWorks to create the components and assembly and simulate air flow speeds.

Results
The results from the scanning electron microscope met our targets with particle size smaller than 80 micrometers and less than 5% oxygen concentration. The CACT Lab was now able to market their powder.