Multifunction laser cell for additive manufacturing and post-processing

DESCRIPTION

The multifunction laser cell is designed for two applications:
• Additive manufacturing of metallic part using Laser Metal Deposition (LMD)
• Laser post-processing of parts manufactured by any method (additive, subtractive, …)

Additive Manufacturing by LMD
This asset has a 4 kW continuous fiber laser, a state of art cladding head (acquired in December 2016) and a closed-loop system of the melt pool. The maximum part size is 1.200 mm diameter x 700 mm height. These dimensions are achieved by a 6 DoF robot and a positioner with two rotations which allows for complex part geometries.
The laser spot can be adjusted continuously between 0.2 and 10 mm, which allows for high precision or high productivity applications.
The raw material is metallic powder which is supplied with a powder feeder that has two hoppers which allows for gradient compositions. The available materials include inconel, titanium, aluminium, different steels, etc.
The asset has all the necessary equipment to develop industrial solutions for LMD.

Additionally, Ceit-IK4 has equipment and knowledge, related to this asset, for: design for AM, topology optimization, material analysis (optical and electronic microscopes, mechanical characterization), generation of deposition trajectories for robots (specific CAM for robots for AM)

Laser post-processing
Using a 3D laser scanner and the same 4 kW laser source, it is possible to perform heat treatments and surface finishing (cleaning and polishing). The working volume for the scanner can be changed between 300 x 300 x 20 mm and 1200 x 1200 x 600 mm. This volume can be extended if the scanner is mounted in the Kuka robot. The process temperature is monitorize with a two color autocalibrated pirometer.