Abstract
The selective laser-melting (SLM) process can be applied to the additive building of complex metal parts using melting metal powder with laser scanning. A metal mesh is a common type of metal screen consisting of parallel rows and intersecting columns. It is widely used in the agricultural, industrial, transportation, and machine protection sectors. This study investigated the fabrication of parts containing a mesh pattern from the SLM of AISI 304 stainless steel powder. The formation of a mesh pattern has a strong potential to increase the functionality and cost-effectiveness of the SLM process. To fabricate a single-layered thin mesh pattern, laser layering has been conducted on a copper base plate. The high thermal conductivity of copper allows heat to pass through it quickly, and prevents the adhesion of a thin laser-melted layer. The effects of the process conditions such as the laser scan speed and scanning path on the size and dimensional accuracy of the fabricated mesh patterns were characterized. As the analysis results indicate, a part with a mesh pattern was successfully obtained, and the application of the proposed method was shown to be feasible with a high degree of reliability.
Highlights
Additive manufacturing (AM) technology has become widely used to fabricate functional metal parts in the automobile, aerospace, and medical device industries owing to its versatile process capacity including a complex geometry, high functionality, and free tool usage
The selective laser melting (SLM) process is a type of AM process in which a 3D part is built layer by layer by melting metal powder through laser scanning
To evaluate the residual stress and transient temperature distributions according to scan track in the SLM process, finite element (FE) simulation has been conducted
Summary
Additive manufacturing (AM) technology has become widely used to fabricate functional metal parts in the automobile, aerospace, and medical device industries owing to its versatile process capacity including a complex geometry, high functionality, and free tool usage. It is advantageous for the fabrication of prototypes and various types of small quantity production because users can change the shape of a product using a 3D CAD solid model [1,2,3,4]. 2 ofbeing material, the production of an expanded mesh sheet can be important when economics are considered [30,31]
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