But early runs with ProtoCast’s laser-powered printers failed. The blades were cracking when Abrate and the team tried to separate them from the platform on which they were printed. The submarine, however, had a secret weapon: a powerful Arcam printer that print parts from TiAl powder. Abrate reached out to Arcam to tweak the machine’s design, make the powder layer thicker and speed up the printing process. Running more experiments, he also learned that preheating the powder before printing removed much of the residual stress from the finished parts. “At that point, we knew what to do,” Abrate says.
