Digital Alloys Joule printing process

The company whose scientific advisory board Tom sits on; Alex Huckstep's employer. Joule printing is their wire-based directed-energy process. Tom uses their cost charts but notes they pick favorable axes ($/cc vs $/kg). ## Figures referenced

They're looking at titanium here. He's broken out laser powder bed, electron beam powder, directed energy wire, directed energy binder jetting, and their process of Joule printing — and lo and behold, their process is cheapest. But it's dollars per cc. If you change it to dollars per kilogram, $1,500 a kilogram, eleven hundred dollars a kilogram, of course it's cheap. This is just the same thing plotted on a different axis. I did the cost ratios — I showed them yesterday and cleaned them up after class. Titanium is really about nine hundred thousand dollars per cubic meter in the wrought form, thirty-two hundred — and steel five thousand per cubic meter. Additive manufacturing steel powder is cheaper than titanium, and the ratios are still five to one and six hundred twenty-five to one. This tells you why they want to focus on titanium. They only have to come up with an advantage. They get sort of the five-to-one disadvantage, and you'll see later in his blogs, they've really done it. Boeing's really done it, when you look at the overall system cost.