Selective laser sintering of filled polymer systems: Bulk properties and laser beam material interaction

Additive manufacturing techniques, such as selective laser melting of plastics, generate components directly from a CAD data set without using a specific mold. The range of materials commercially available for selective laser sintering merely includes some semi crystalline polymers mainly polyamides, which leads to an absence of realizable component properties. The presented investigations are concerned with the manufacturing and analysis of components made from filled polymer systems by means of selective laser sintering. The test specimens were generated at varied filler concentration, filler types and manufacturing parameter like laser power or scan speed. In addition to the characterization of the mixed powders, resulting melt depth were analyzed in order to investigate the beam material interaction. The basic understanding of the influence of different fillers, filler concentration and manufacturing parameters on resulting component properties will lead to new realizable component properties and thus fields of application of selective laser sintering.