INVESTIGATION ON THE PREHEATING TEMPERATURE CONTROL BASED ON PART'S SLICING IN SELECTIVE LASER SINTERING

Abstract

In the current selective laser sintering(SLS) machines, the curl distortion of SLS part is reduced by adding support or manually adjusting preheating temperature, which results in the big working strength, waste of SLS material, low fabrication efficiency, and difficulty to exactly control preheating temperature. For this reason, a new control method based on part's slicing is presented in this paper, which can automatically adjust the preheating temperature according to the different section shape of a part. This new control method is validated in the SLS machine developed by Huazhong University of Science and Technology. The results of experiment and application show that the surface quality, dimensional accuracy and shape accuracy of the part fabricated with this new control method are better than the ones of the part fabricated with the current control method, and this new control method puts the SLS process into automatization successfully.