metal filament

after seeing the laywood filament and finding a paper which said that it is basically made by mixing wooden powder with pla powder and extruding the mix , i was wondering if the same would be possible for metal powder??

i am no expert in metallurgy, it was just a thought that came to my mind...

any comments???

I can imagine it being extremely abrasive to the nozzle.
What exactly do you want to achieve with metal powder infused filament?

What are you trying to do? If you want plastic with metal in it, that would work great... But why would you want plastic with metal powder in it? It won't be very conductive and it won't look much like metal.

Do you mean this as a way to print metal parts? People have tried printing metal pastes similar to what you are describing, then curing the print to have a 100% metal object. This process has a huge amount of shrinkage and warpage, so what you can print turns out to be pretty limited.

@peteD

i was thinking something like on the lines of metal clay that is used by jewelers... And i was not aware of the shrinkage problem....how much would a part shrink after curing?

As usual when you ask a question like this you inevitably receive a few "It won't work", "its been tried before" comments, so I will counteract these with a positive one.

Mixing a hard powder / fibre with a soft plastic does work. Its actually quite common in industry using glass filled plastic, titanium dioxide, chalk, carbon black and many other materials. There's a quick guide here.

Plastic additives

If done right it improves strength and dimensional stability and reduces shrinkage (A hard non melting additive doesn't shrink much when cooling, so the % shrinkage is reduced).

If you think about it we are all probably printing with filament that isn't 100% ABS / PLA already.

There is no reason why this wouldn't work with a plastic / metal filament.

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Helium Frog Website

Metal Injection Moulding may also be of interest to this discussion. A binder and metal mix is injected into a mould then fired.
3D printing such a mixture shouldn't be too much of a leap from this process.

The Wiki page is here
Wiki Page

Here is an example of a company that does it and some of the parts that are possible.
UK Company

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Helium Frog Website

@martinprice2004

thanks for the insight on MIM ... was looking for something like this.....