Selective Laser Sintering
Machine maintenance, oiling, operating woes and drones of a factory!!Well, these words may be frustrating for those who are associated with it. Stop worrying about the same and welcome to a new age of SLS that means selective laser sintering. So what is selective laser sintering? It is a very simple process. In the process of selective laser sintering, a very high powered laser acts on a variety of powdered materials like metal or glass and forms it into a 3D object as defined by a computer aided design. So basically, selective laser sintering involves a high powered laser changing the state of certain materials to form an object.
And how does it work? How does it help? Let us take it one step at a time.
Step 1: Getting ready for selective laser sintering
The first step would involve getting together in one place all the material required. The material is limited and basically involves:
1. Powder materials that have been chosen from a wide variety found commercially – these could include glass, polymers, metals and green sand.
2. A Selective Laser Sintering system.
Step 2: Changing forms
In the second step, a computer-aided design is worked on as a model for the finished product. The laser part of the selective laser sintering system has a powder bed where the powder materials are layered for the laser to act on. The laser then uses the 3D description provided to it to scan cross-sections on the powder bed of the design required and accordingly works on fusing the powder materials into parts of objects. It works on one cross section at a time and uses one layer at a time of the powder bed. This is taken care of when a new layer is added to the top of the bed after each layer used.
The layer of material is made into a mass by either melting it fully or partially, or sintering it in the liquid phase.
Advantages of selective laser sintering
As compared to conventional methods of manufacturing, selective laser sintering can achieve even up to 100% density depending on the materials used with comparable material properties. Also, since a large number of parts can be filled into a powder bed, the productivity is very high.
Selective laser sintering is an additive manufacturing. However, as compared to other additive manufacturing methods, selective laser sintering can produce using a very wide range of powder materials. Also, as opposed to other kinds of additive manufacturing procedures, selective laser sintering systems are free from extra support structures as its structure is built to have it surrounded by unsintered powder all the time.
Selective laser sintering systems are also able to easily manufacture complex geometrics based just on computer aided design.
Some lesser-known facts
Although selective laser sintering is used widely in manufacturing, few know that its use is rapidly increasing in the area of art.
In 1979, R.F. Householder patented a system much like selective laser sintering but this was not commercialized. In the 1980s, Dr. Carl Deckard of the University of Texas at Austin, under a sponsorship from DARPA, developed and patented the selective laser sintering system and it then became commercialized.
