Investigation and development of large-scale equipment and high performance materials for powder bed laser fusion additive manufacturing

Abstract

The current available selective laser sintering (SLS) and selective laser melting (SLM) systems have relatively small effective building volumes, which do not offer capability to integrally manufacture a large dimension component. Therefore, our research team in Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China, has broken through some key techniques such as the large powder bed preheating system and multi-laser scanning technique, and then successfully developed a series of large-scale SLS systems with effective building volumes up to 1400×1400×500 mm3, and an SLM system with an 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. In addition, several high performance materials have been developed for the large-scale SLS/SLM systems.