Assessing New Support Minimizing Strategies for the Additive Manufacturing Technology SLM

Abstract

To successfully produce metal parts by SLM, additional support structures are needed to support overhanging surfaces in order to dissipate process heat and to minimize geometrical distortions induced by internal stresses. These structures are often massive and require additional post-processing time for their removal. A minimization of the extent to which support structures are needed would therefore significantly reduce manufacturing and finishing efforts and costs. A specific component segmentation strategy is developed. It allows the segmentation of critical areas of the component by applying a specific scanning strategy with appropriate energy input and optimized supporting strategies. The results indicate that the supporting effort can generally be reduced, e.g. overhang geometries with an angle to the horizontal of less than 35° can be manufactured without any support. The successful realization of the segmentation strategy in combination with optimized support structures allows the implementation of a stacking strategy, thereby using the available work space more efficiently.