The Tuesday morning started with a panel session on Industrial Laser Applications / Laser Additive Manufacturing
The presentation of Dr.Thomas Ebert from IQ evolution GmbH was a good summary on the SLM. Dr. Ebert was explaining the challenges which can occur with powder bed baser laser additive manufacturing. He described what it takes to make a component manufacture able and pointed out that tweaking of just one parameter and focusing on one feature of a part won’t lead to an overall good result. Especially with a part having very small and intricate design features it always comes down to the right scan strategy and special process parameters to achieve geometric accurate parts.
But Laser World of PHOTONICS is not just about laser based machines and processes but also about the components they are made of. Lasers, lenses, gantry systems, control and measuring devices, beam expander, beam shaper and scanners. SCANLAB is one of the suppliers of devices for laser beam deflection and positioning systems.
Scanlab was presenting an interesting new product relevant for laser based additive manufacturing. So it’s a new range of air cooled scanners. Sending hundreds of watts of laser power through a scanner lets the system warm up.
Nothing you want as this can lead to deviations and lower positioning accuracy. So most systems are water cooled but this always comes at the risk of damage through leakage. In the past systems have been destroyed during transport as they got to cold and the ice bursted all internals of the cooling path. A further disadvantage is thatthe chiller is usually a huge power consumer. The new systems build quite large compared to water cooled scanners but they certainly could be accommodated in direct-metal systems to mitigates this risks and turn a machine in a 400V system into 240V device.
Links:
http://www.world-of-photonics.com/index-2.html http://iq-evolution.com/en/ http://www.scanlab.de/en http://www.lzh.de/en http://www.iwb.tum.de/en/Additive+Manufacturing.html http://www.ilt.fraunhofer.de/en.html http://www.concept-laser.de/en/home.html http://www.stage.slm-solutions.com/index.php?index_en http://www.sisma.com/eng/additive-manufacturing/ http://www.realizer.com/ http://www.aconity3d.com/