CURRENT AND FUTURE PROSPECTS IN MANUFACTURING TECHNOLOGIES BY SELECTIVE LASER MELTING

The main driving force of rapid prototyping (RP) or layer manufacturing techniques changed from fabrication of prototypes to rapid tooling (RT) and rapid manufacturing (RM). Nowadays, the direct fabrication of functional or structural end-use products made by layer manufacturing methods, RM, is the main trend. Selective laser melting (SLM) is driven by the need to process near full density objects with mechanical properties comparable to those of bulk materials. During the process the powder particles are completely molten by the laser beam. The resulting high density allows avoiding lengthy post-processing as required with selective laser sintering (SLS) of metal powders. In this paper will be presented the state of the art in this field and researches lead to the developement of this process.