Hossein Sheykh has recently celebrated his one-year anniversary working as an Application Engineer for Wayland Additive. Previously he spent almost ten years working with laser powder bed fusion (L-PBF) metal additive manufacturing (AM) systems. Moving from laser to eBeam PBF, and more specifically Wayland’s NeuBeam technology on the Calibur3, was, in Hossein’s own words “a big change.”
Here in this post, Hossein shares some of his observations from working with both laser and eBeam PBF. It is important to note that this is not intended as a ‘one vs the other’ or a ‘right vs wrong piece’, it is offered merely to provide insight that may be of value to readers.
The first thing that struck me was that I had to “unlearn” many things that I thought I knew about metal additive manufacturing (AM).
Now, after a year of hands-on work with NeuBeam and Calibur3, here are some of the key things that I have noticed:
The technology gap is closing:
Many old arguments about “eBeam vs Laser” are not as clear today. Laser systems have improved significantly. They are now printing high temperature alloys and using advanced support-free strategies. It is fair to say that laser technology is very mature today.
The physics is still fundamentally different:
Even when the results look similar, the thermal behaviour is not. Running a build at very high temperatures changes the whole picture. Distortion does not disappear, but it behaves differently. I have found that eBeam PBF can be more forgiving when printing very bulky or tall parts. There is often more room to adjust beam parameters before the process becomes unstable, thanks to the high temperature chamber. This also means parts often come off the build with much lower residual stress and in many cases do not require a separate stress relieving process to be applied post build.
Choosing the right tool:
Laser PBF still has a clear advantage when smoother surface finishes or very fine details are required. I do not see eBeam PBF as a replacement for laser, rather, it is an alternative tool for solving different engineering problems. In some cases, particularly with crack-sensitive alloys or very large, highly constrained parts, eBeam PBF is the process that makes the build feasible in the first place.
Looking back, the biggest change this year was not just using a new technology. It was the shift in my own mindset about thermal stability, process parameters, post processing and the real limits of the process. I'm excited to see where both technologies go next.
Perhaps the best way to sum up here is to refer to a comment from Joe Miskell, Wayland Additive’s Principal Applications Engineer, who said: “Anyone who's serious about metal AM in demanding sectors will house both technologies, and have the talent to know how to choose the right process for the application.”