Metal additive manufacturing (MAM) has received a lot of research attention since high-quality alloy components with optimized designs can be produced for a wide range of applications in aerospace and biomedical industries. However, the printing resolution, high operational cost, and overall printing time hinder the full potential of MAM as a solution for realizing next generation functionally graded multi-metals. Herein, a low viscosity copper nickel (CuNi) alloy precursor resin was incorporated into the continuous liquid interface production (CLIP) 3D printing process resulting in microscale CuNi alloy objects with low surface roughness (Ra = 0.795 µm) and superior printing speed (exceeding 130 µm/s). Because alloy precursor additives are used to synthesize CuNi alloy parts, physical properties, such as relative density and microstructure porosity, can be controlled by adjusting the CuNi composition, sintering temperature, and metal precursor concentration resulting in microporosity values ranging from extremely dense to highly porous (0.2 %-5.71 %). Moreover, continuously 3D printed CuNi alloys are monolithic and exhibit a uniform microstructure after post-heat treatment, showing an overall volumetric shrinkage of 60–75 %, resulting in isotropic physical properties displayed in the final printed part. Due to the high level of control over the process, novel alloy metamaterials such as bio-inspired lattice structures with microscale porosity and good mechanical or thermal properties can be easily reproduced. This research demonstrates that alloy and multi-metal 3D objects fabricated through the layer-less AM approach provides a cost-effective and innovative strategy to overcome the current limitations of layer-based multi-metal AM technologies.
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