System represents a huge leap forward in productivity and performance for powder bed fusion applications
Sintavia, LLC, the world’s leading all-digital aerospace component manufacturer, announced today that it had commissioned the first multi-laser industrial 3D printer in North America equipped with nLIGHT AFX beam shaping fiber laser systems. The state-of-the-art twin 1.2 kW lasers, installed on an AMCM M290-2, allow for operators of industrial 3D printers to modulate beam spot size and shape without any loss of power and material density, resulting in builds that are more productive and less wasteful.
“We welcome this new addition to our fleet of printers,” said Brian Neff, Sintavia’s Founder and CEO. “Over the coming years as we develop and apply this new technology, we expect to be able to print our components at layer thicknesses of 150µm or more without losing any material properties, thus greatly increasing the output of our installed printers. The best part of the nLIGHT system, once it is fully tested, is that it can be retrofitted on other existing EOS and AMCM printers with minimal new equipment.”
“We can think of no better home for the first dual nLIGHT system in the U.S. than Sintavia,” said Martin Bullemer, Managing Director of AMCM, GmbH. “With their vertically integrated additive manufacturing capabilities, including extensive testing labs, they are well-suited to help develop and expand the capabilities of the nLIGHT laser beam shaping technology.”
Laser beam shaping systems such as nLIGHT offer a step-function in laser productivity over the Gaussian laser shape that is standard across the powder bed fusion (PBF) additive manufacturing industry today. Beam shaping allows for fully dense material to be melted at a diameter over three times greater than standard laser systems, meaning that standard layer thicknesses currently used by the industry (typically 30-45µm) can be doubled or tripled without any loss of material performance. At the same time, since a part can now be printed using fewer layers, less condensate (the metal vapor jet generated during the PBF process) is produced. Condensate is the most problematic byproduct of the PBF process, and studies have shown that the use of nLIGHT beam shaping lasers can reduce this waste stream by up to 70%. Finally, by fully melting thicker build layers without losing density, grain size in the z-direction is increased, resulting in improved material performance—in particular for those applications with high creep requirements.
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