Implementation of contactless supports for industrially relevant additively manufactured parts in metal
Umberto Paggi, Lore Thijs, Brecht Van Hooreweder
Abstract
Additive manufacturing has revolutionized the way that components can be designed and produced. A common notion in this field is “complexity for free”, which acknowledges both the reduced cost per part in extremely challenging designs and the possibility of manufacturing geometries that would be impossible to obtain via conventional means. However, even for Laser Powder Bed Fusion or LPBF, the most widely used technology for metals, several limits still remain to what can be printed, such as downfacing surfaces which usually have increased surface roughness and reduced dimensional accuracy due to local overheating and warpage. In this work, a new type of support that does not touch the printed part was developed and validated. This contactless support creates a thin powder gap that provides thermal conduction and stabilizes the liquid melt pool. To prove the benefits of this new technique an impeller case was printed both with conventional and contactless supports while the processing time and surface roughness of the two were compared, confirming the significant increase in productivity and better quality due to the new strategy.