Femtosecond Laser Additive Manufacturing of Multi-Material Layered Structures

Efficient concurrent toolpath planning for multi-material layered manufacturing

S.H. Choi and W.K. Zhu Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Abstract Reviewed, accepted September 10, 2008 This paper proposes an algorithm for planning efficient concurrent toolpaths to reduce the build-time of fabricating multi-material prototypes by layered manufacturing. The algorithm first sorts and partitions slice contours...

Quality part production via multi-laser additive manufacturing

Tailoring Material Properties in Layered Manufacturing

This paper discusses an approach for tailoring material properties in parts fabricated using Layered Manufacturing (LM). Solid model of the part is subdivided into various sub regions based on stress analysis. All subdivided regions are fabricated together by using Rapid Prototyping with process parameter values assigned as per their stress values. As mechanical properties are varying with proc...

Novel Beam Diagnostics Improve Laser Additive Manufacturing

Laser additive manufacturing (LAM) is rapidly becoming an important method for the fabrication of both prototype and production metal parts. However, the technology is really just in its infancy, and significant work still needs to be done in the development of new materials and in understanding how various process parameters affect results. In particular, LAM methods typically have a relativel...

Laser Additive Manufacturing Process Planning and Automation

This paper presents a Laser Additive Manufacturing Process Planning (LAMPP) being developed at the University of Missouri-Rolla. The off-line planning recognizes difficult-to-build features from an STL file, selects optimal part orientation and building directions based on the skeleton information of the object geometry, and optimizes the sub-process sequences for deposition and machining. Duri...