Large-Scale Equipment and Higher Performance Materials for Laser Additive Manufacturing

Abstract

The current available selective laser sintering (SLS) and selective laser melting (SLM) equipment has a relatively small effective building volume, which does not offer capability to integrally manufacture a larger dimension component. Therefore, our research team has investigated key SLS processing techniques such as the large powder bed preheating system and multi-laser scanning system, and then successfully developed of a series of large-scale SLS systems with the effective building volumes of 1400×700×500 mm3 and 1400×1400×500 mm3, and SLM system with the effective building volume of 500×250×400 mm3. These large scale SLS/SLM systems will not only offer new capability to make large complex prototypes and products, but also provide higher volume production capability to make numerous small parts rapidly and cost-effectively. High performance materials have been developed for the large-scale SLS/SLM systems. Especially, nylon coated composite powders were prepared by a dissolution-precipitation process, which is able to uniformly disperse the micro/nano-scale filler particles in the nylon matrix, and thus enhance the properties of nylon SLS parts.