Laser inversion enables multi-materials 3D printing

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Additive manufacturing—or 3D printing—uses digital manufacturing processes to fabricate components that are strong and require no special tooling to produce. Over the past decade, the field has experienced staggering growth, at a rate of more than 20% per year, printing pieces that range from aircraft components and car parts to medical and dental implants out of metals and engineering polymers.

One of the most widely used manufacturing processes, selective laser sintering (SLS), prints parts out of micron-scale material powders using a laser: the laser heats the particles to the point where they fuse together to form a solid mass. 

The catch is that SLS technologies have been limited to printing with a single material at a time: the entire part has to be made of just that one powder. Lipson continues, “how many products are made of just one material? The limitations of printing in only one material has been haunting the industry and preventing it from reaching its full potential.” 

Wondering how to solve this challenge, Lipson and his PhD student John Whitehead used their expertise in robotics to develop a new approach to overcome these SLS limitations. By inverting the laser so that it points upwards, they invented a way to enable SLS to use—at the same time—multiple materials. Their working prototype, along with a print sample that contained two different materials in the same layer, was recently published online by Additive Manufacturing as part of its December 2020 issue. 

“Our initial results are exciting,” says Whitehead.

This process works well, but using multiple materials in a single print has been very challenging, because once the powder layer is deposited, it cannot be unplaced, or replaced with a different powder. 

S: https://www.newswise.com/articles/laser-inversion-enables-multi-materials-3d-printing

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