Laser powder bed fusion of glass-filled polyamide-composite with enhanced physical properties

Glass-filled polyamide (GF/PA) is an important engineering material for automotive industry because of its excellent physical, thermal and mechanical properties. But it is challenging to produce high quality functional parts through additive manufacturing technology like selective laser sintering (SLS). It is due to fact that SLS made parts exhibit high dependence on the sintering conditions. Thus, it becomes essential to adjust these sintering conditions accurately to improve physical properties like density and hardness to enhance the widespread use of this technology. Therefore, this study presents a statistical analysis of the SLS process parameters led by a design of experiment to extract information about their influence on hardness and density of the PA 3200 GF composite. GF/PA with a refresh rate of 60:40 was used for the part fabrication and the effect of five key sintering parameters has been considered for analysis. Experiments revealed that poor material integrity and weak interaction between the particles at lower energy density were the main reason for the lower hardness and density of fabricated parts.