Selective laser beam melting of polymers: In situ and offline measurements for process adapted thermal characterization

Selective laser beam melting of polymers has to overcome the borders between pure prototype construction and the manufacturing of serial parts. Therefore, a high level of reproducibility of the generated components must be ensured. Up to now, the thermal history of a component during selective laser beam melting is unknown. Neither the temperature during exposure of one layer nor the temperature development in z- or build direction is detected or even regulated. Therefore, in this study the temperature during laser exposure will be detected in a dual approach. The fundamental material beam interaction will be analyzed with a specific test set up, the so-called Laser-HS-DSC. This allows the detection of material beam interactions in combination with a commercial DSC experiment to analyze whether degradation occurs or not. With in situ infrared measurements in a selective laser beam melting system the maximum temperature during laser exposure can be measured. Finally, the offline Laser-HS-DSC experiments are compared to resulting maximum temperatures during exposure in a selective laser beam melting system. The same tendencies of maximum temperatures with varying energy input are obtained, whereas the maximum levels differ due to the different amount of exposed particles.