The Process

Ultrasonic Consolidation is a revolutionary process technology that uses sound to merge layers of metal drawn from featureless foil stock. The process produces true metallurgical bonds with full density and works with a variety of metals. In combining additive and subtractive process capabilities, Ultrasonic Consolidation can create deep slots, hollow, latticed, or honeycombed internal structures, and other complex geometries traditionally difficult or impossible with conventional subtractive manufacturing processes.  This versatile process yields a wide range of benefits, among them:

• Tamperproof, ultra-rugged enclosures
• Low process heat enables electronics embedding
• Non-destructive, fully-encapsulating fiber embedding
• Complex internal geometries
• Fully enclosed, sealed internal cavity creation and object embedding
• Dissimilar material joining
• Self-actuating structures
• Rapid tooling
• Rapid prototype components
• Many others

Formation™ Machine

The state- of-the-art Formation™ machine, using Ultrasonic Consolidation, is the first one step, one button, direct-to-metal aluminum system anywhere in the world. Form-ation offers the benefits of additive and subtractive manufacturing in a single machine:

• Very high fabrication speed
• Low process heat
• Unattended operation
• Stop or restart builds at any time
• Dissimilar material joining
• Internal geometry capability
• Material embedding
• No multiple steps or secondary operations required
• Does not generate heat, spray or vapors
• No expensive lasers to replace
• Customer-defined material vendors