Capabilities and Performances of the Selective Laser Melting Process

The current market is in a phase of accelerated process of change, that leads companies to innovate in new techniques or technologies to respond as quickly as possible to the everchanging aspects of the global environment. The economy of a country is heavily dependent on new and innovative products with very short development time. Companies, currently, have considerable success, only if they develop the ability to respond quickly to changing of customer needs and to use new innovative technologies. In this context, the companies that can offer a greater variety of new products with higher performance resulting in advantage over the other. At the heart of this environment there is a new generation of customers, who forced organizations to research new technologies and techniques to improve business processes and accelerate product development cycle. As a direct result, factories are forced to apply a new philosophy of engineering as the Rapid Response to Manufacturing (RRM). The concept of the RRM uses products previously designed to support the development of new products. The RRM environment was developed by integrating the various technologies, such as CAD-based modelling, the knowledge-based engineering for integrated product and process management and the direct production concepts. Direct production uses prototyping, tooling and rapid manufacturing technologies to quickly test the design and build the part (Cherng et al., 1998). Among RRM technologies, Rapid (RP) and Virtual (VP) Prototyping are revolutionizing the way in which artefacts are designed. Rapid Prototyping (RP) technologies embraces a wide range of processes for producing parts directly from CAD models, with little need for human intervention; so, designers can produce real prototypes, even very complex, in a simple and efficient way, allowing them to check the assembly and functionality of the design, minimizing errors, product development costs and lead times (Waterman & Dickens, 1994). The SLS technology was developed, like other RP technologies, to provide a prototyping technique to decrease the time and cost of the product cycle design. It consists of building a three dimensional object layer by layer selectively sintering or partial melting a powder bed by laser radiation.