Outlook For Additive Manufacturing With Copper: 51% CAGR Through 2027

Copper additive manufacturing (AM) is a rapidly expanding opportunity within the AM industry, thanks to a wave of technical developments which have begun to enable reliable, high quality printing of copper and copper alloys. As a result, commercial entities have begun to ramp up internal research and investments to capitalise on opportunities in industrial markets for copper components, with long term potential in electronics and medical devices setting the stage for copper materials to become one of the most influential in the broader metal AM industry.

According to a new market study titled ‘Copper Additive Manufacturing 2019 Market Database and Outlook’ by SmarTech Market Publishing, shipments of copper powders to additive manufacturing (AM) users grew by 45 percent in 2018, with an expected 60 percent growth during 2019. Fuelled by key technical developments in copper additive processes and materials, AM has the potential to create disruptive copper component applications in industrial markets in the immediate future, as solutions continue to be adopted and refined. From 2019 to 2027, the copper AM industry is expected to register a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 51 percent.

Copper printing exploration has been ongoing for many years, with published research dating back to at least 2010, according to SmarTech. The largest market catalyst came in 2016 with the development and certification of printing of copper alloys, as well as pure copper, utilising metal powder bed fusion technologies (both laser and electron beam variants) for the production of copper induction coils.

Copper materials are being explored within each of the three primary metal AM print technology families today, but their chemistry does present challenges to processing using established or ‘conventional’ metal AM system configurations in most available technologies. To overcome these challenges, SmarTech believes there are three primary avenues of technical development which are influencing the overall adoption of copper printing:

• Alterations to or adaptations of hardware architecture of existing printing systems
• Tailoring of material properties and powder characteristics of copper materials used
• Development of alternative metal additive printing technologies suited to copper printing

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