Interesting! Can you reference some numbers? Other processes such as SLM and DED require a powerful laser, starting from 3000W. When talking about copper specifically and especially when wanting higher processes speed, you need higher wavelength blue laser reaching 10000W of power. But on the flipside, the process can be quite quick. Non-laser alternatives like Metal Paste Deposition need a furnace, though I'm unsure of the power requirements there.
Any idea or references on how ECAM would compare to that?
every metal atom requires two electrons (or three for some metals), and you typically need 1–3 volts, and sometimes there are side reactions that waste most of your electrons; probably 'faradaic efficiency' or 'coulombic efficiency' is the term to google
slm and ded and metal paste deposition just have to rearrange some crystal structures; in electrolysis (including ecm machining) and electrodeposition you have to actually rip molecules apart, atom by atom and electron by electron
basically you're charging a battery, so you can get a rough idea by thinking about how much energy a battery could store if it was the same size as your desired workpiece
Based on the graph the process is producing way less CO2 than other additive processes. Being low temperature this intuitively seems a credible claim. Maybe you are concerned about high currents which is true but since voltage is low that does not multiply to much.
It's because that chart is measuring end-to-end energy use. Other metal printing approaches require a lot of energy to make the metal powders, so when you include that the other approaches are a lot worse.
it's an interesting point; you do of course have to add those electrons to the metal atoms in the first place when you're smelting it from ore, unless you're working from a rare native metal deposit, and plausibly you could leach metal ions out of ore and feed them into your 3-d printer. i suspect that the tests they've done so far, however, are using reagent-grade metal salts from sigma-aldrich or similar with much more embodied energy than metallurgical-grade copper or whatever
