I was having a conversation with a friend in Switzerland the other day and had an interesting thought. What if you could selectively weld plastics, or more exotic materials, with an ultrasonic feeder? It would probably be prohibitively expensive but the feed head could be extremely tiny.
Maybe with such a system an extruder could extruder plastic power melting in only as it leaves the nozzle?
I also wonder if such a thing could be used to extrude plastic pellets into a uniform string to use in a standard extruder later.
Ultrasonics would provide instant on off and with the right insulators provide near instant heat/cool cycles.
Or another thought was ultrasonic metal sintering instead of laser sintering on power?
