Laser Additive Manufacturing

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...

Sensing, modeling and control for laser-based additive manufacturing

Laser-Based Additive Manufacturing (LBAM) is a promising manufacturing technology that can be widely applied to part preparation, surface modification, and Solid Freeform Fabrication (SFF). A large number of parameters govern the LBAM process. These parameters are sensitive to the environmental variations, and they also influence each other. This paper introduces the research work in RCAM on im...

Laser additive manufacturing of 3D meshes for optical applications

Selective laser melting (SLM) is a widely used additive manufacturing process that can be used for printing of intricate three dimensional (3D) metallic structures. Here we demonstrate the fabrication of titanium alloy Ti-6Al-4V alloy based 3D meshes with nodally-connected diamond like unit cells, with lattice spacing varying from 400 to 1000 microns. A Concept Laser M2 system equipped with las...

Quality part production via multi-laser additive manufacturing