3D Printing: How It Will Revolutionize the Manufacturing Industry

Originally the domain of engineers, researchers and enthusiasts, 3D printing has grown into a substantial industry. What began as a niche interest has expanded to widespread use in various applications and in mass production. A more technical term for this is additive manufacturing, and it is used to manufacture extremely important parts in many fields, from complex machine parts to airplane engine components.

3D printing of a material can be achieved by using many different methods, but a specific subset of additive manufacturing can use optical fibers at the heart of its technology: the additive manufacturing of metals using laser beams. Typical metals can be used, such as aluminum, copper, or stainless steel. There are two main methods for the 3D printing of metal using high-power fiber lasers:

Powder Bed Fusion (PBF)—Selective Laser Melting (SLM) process
Direct Energy Deposition (DED)—Laser Material Deposition (LMD) process

Most metal 3D printing technologies operate on the same fundamental principle: they use a laser to melt a metal powder at precise locations. This process allows the powder to solidify into a solid metal, taking the shape of the final item we want to manufacture. The lasers used are often based on ytterbium-doped active fibers, from a few hundred Watts to 2 kW in power. Usually, a single mode or high beam quality laser is required because we can manufacture very fine parts when the laser is focused on a very small area. On top of their versatility in terms of achievable power and compactness, fiber lasers are also preferred for their great beam quality and precise control of the beam position.

The Right Method for the Best Results

The first method enters the Power Bed Fusion category, where a machine systematically deposits layers of metal powder. A laser beam is then precisely directed to melt the powder, but only at specific points. This is why it is called the Selective Laser Melting (SLM) process. Once all layers are done, the excess powder is removed and all that remains is the 3D printed part. Afterwards, the part may require cleaning and additional machining iterations before its final, usable form. Below is a simplified overview of the process:

While this process is not inherently fast, the system can employ multiple laser sources simultaneously to quicken the solidification of each powder layer. Since fiber lasers are also compact, this can be scaled to achieve high-volume industrial needs.

The second process we want to mention is Laser Material Deposition (LMD). Unlike the previous method, where the metal powder is placed on the process surface beforehand, a stream of powder material is ejected alongside the laser beam and fed onto the fusion point of the moving laser. The process can be simplified like this:

This process will use less metal powder overall, since a lot can be wasted in the powder bed fusion technique (even though a lot remains “wasted” in the LMD process). The finished product will be very similar to the SLM process.

A Bright and Promising Future

3D-printed components have become crucial elements across numerous high-tech industries: from the manufacturing of complex or custom items in the medical and dental care fields, to aerospace companies where parts as critical as rocket engine nozzles are now made by additive manufacturing.

New processes and new types of 3D printing machines are constantly invented, and fiber lasers will remain a flexible technology to supply high power and high-quality beams for these applications. Coractive will always be on the lookout to make sure we can offer high performance active fibers to build these lasers.

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