Electron beam melting (EBM) is an effective and competent additive
manufacturing process for fabricating three-dimensional metal parts. EBM process uses
raw materials in the form of powders. EBM uses an electron beam as the heat source to
carry out the bonding process between powders to consolidate them into a required
solid part. It involves the use of data from a 3D computer-aided design (CAD) model to
create successive layers of raw material. This process requires a vacuum chamber
finding EBM as a suitable technique to process reactive materials like titanium alloys.
Apart from titanium alloys, EBM also caters to a wide range of powder materials like
alloys of cobalt, Inconel, copper, and steel. The parts fabricated using EBM are fully
dense and exhibit good mechanical and morphological properties. The applications of
EBM include automotive, tooling, aerospace, and biomedical implant industries.
Keywords: Additive manufacturing, Aerospace, Automotive, Beam intensity,
Biomedical implants, Cobalt, Electron beam, Hatch space, Layered manufacturing,
Layer preparation, Metal alloys, Multi-materials, Nickel, Powder bed
fusion, Process parameters, Rapid prototyping, Scan speed, Steel, Titanium,
Tooling.