Fabrication of 3D multi-material parts using laser-based powder bed fusion

As different branches of industry use Laser Beam Melting (LBM) and more and more materials can be produced with it, this technology goes in and out of focus of production technologies in an industrial environment. A big advantage of LBM is the possibility of building very complex parts and therefore minimizing the need for raw material. The effects of this, such as lightweight-design, resource-efficient production and reduction of manufacturing time, can even be increased if material can be used locally defined in a part, so that one part does not have to consist of one material per fabrication-process, but at least two. Since LBM is a powder-bed-based process, the implementation of this idea is possible by adopting the conventional delivery device and the manufacturing process itself. In this paper the results of a multi-material process are shown and the influences of different material properties on the manufacturing process are derived.