Laser-Beam Fusion of Predeposited Metal Powder for Layered Manufacturing: Modeling, Simulation, and Experiment

Current commercial Rapid Prototyping (RP) systems can be used for fabricating layered models for subsequent creation of fully-dense metal parts using investment casting. Due to increased demand for shortened product development cycles, however, there exists a demand to rapidly create functional fully-dense metal parts without hard tooling. A possible solution to this problem is direct layered Rapid Manufacturing (RM) of such parts, for example, via laser-beam fusion of the metal powder. The RM process proposed herein is based on this approach. It involves selective laser-beam scanning of a predeposited metal-powder layer, forming fully-dense claddings, as the basic building block of individual layers. This paper specifically addresses only one of the fundamental issues of the proposed RM process, namely the fabrication of single claddings. Our theoretical investigation of the influence of the process parameters on cladding’s geometrical properties employed thermal modeling and computer process simulation. Numerous experiments, involving fabrication of single claddings, were also carried out with varying process parameters. Comparisons of the process simulations and experimental results showed good agreement in terms of overall trends.