SELECTIVE LASER MELTING FOR RAPID PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT

Razvan PACURAR, Petru Berce

Abstract


Selective laser melting (SLM) is one of the most important technologies used when complex metallic parts need to be rapidly manufactured. There are some requirements related to the mechanical properties of the material, surface roughness, the accuracy of the manufactured part and the process control, in order to turn SLM process into a production technique. The presented work investigates if the SLM process, according to the state of the art, fulfills these manufacturing requirements, trying to show meantime few opportunities / applications of the metallic parts manufactured by means of SLM. The results of the developed research underline and recommend that compensation factors must be used, in order to get a good correlation between the SLM manufactured prototype and the CAD model dimensions. By doing so, the time needed for the Rapid Product Development process using the SLM manufacturing method will be significantly decreased. Finite element analysis (FEA) and Design Expert software were jointly used in order to determine the optimum process parameters and the compensation factors required to improve the accuracy of the SLM process. An interesting case study undertaken at the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca (TUCN) in cooperation with an industrial company from Romania, using our MTT Realizer II SLM 250 equipment is also presented in the paper. Key words: Additive Layer Manufacturing (ALM), Rapid Manufacturing (RM), Rapid Prototyping (RP), Selective Laser Melting (SLM), Finite Element Analysis (FEA)

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References


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