A technology developed at Graz University of Technology in Austria uses LED instead of laser sources for the additive manufacturing of metal parts and optimizes 3D metal printing in terms of construction time, metal powder consumption, equipment costs and post-processing effort.
This new technology is named as SLEDM ie Selective LED-based melting. The research team has now applied for a patent for this new technology i.e. the targeted melting of metal powder using high-power LED light sources.
The technology is similar to selective laser melting (SLM) and electron beam melting (EBM), in which metal powder is melted by means of a laser or electron beam and built up into a component layer by layer. However, SLEDM solves two central problems of these powder bed-based manufacturing processes: the time-consuming production of large-volume metal components and the time-consuming manual post-processing.
Unlike the SLM or EBM processes, the SLEDM process uses a high-power LED beam to melt the metal powder. The light-emitting diodes used for this purpose were specially adapted by the west Styrian lighting specialist Preworks and equipped with a complex lens system by which the diameter of the LED focus can be easily changed between 0.05 and 20 millimetres during the melting process. This enables the melting of larger volumes per unit of time without having to dispense with filigree internal structures, thus reducing the production time of components for fuel cell or medical technology, for example, by a factor of 20 on average.
News Source: TU Graz
