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A targeted material selection process for polymers in laser sintering

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journal contribution
posted on 2019-02-05, 11:12 authored by Mike Vasquez, Candice E. Majewski, Barry Haworth, Neil Hopkinson
Laser sintering (LS) of polymer materials is a process that has been developed over the last two decades and has been applied in industries ranging from aerospace to sporting goods. However, one of the current major limitations of the process is the restricted range of usable materials. Various material characteristics have been proposed as being important to optimise the laser sintering process, key aspects of which have been combined in this work to develop an understanding of the most crucial requirements for LS process design and materials selection. Using the favourable characteristics of polyamide-12 (the most often used material for laser sintering) as a benchmark, a previously un-sintered thermoplastic elastomer material was identified as being suitable for the LS process, through a combination of information from Differential Scanning Calorimetry (DSC), hot stage microscopy (HSM) and knowledge of viscosity data. Subsequent laser sintering builds confirmed the viability of this new material, and tensile test results were favourable when compared with materials that are currently commercially available, thereby demonstrating the efficacy of the chosen selection process.

Funding

The authors would like to acknowledge the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) of Great Britain IMCRC at Loughborough University, as the primary funding source for this research.

History

School

  • Aeronautical, Automotive, Chemical and Materials Engineering

Department

  • Materials

Published in

Additive Manufacturing

Volume

1-4

Pages

127 - 138

Citation

VASQUEZ, M. ... et al, 2014. A targeted material selection process for polymers in laser sintering. Additive Manufacturing, 1-4, pp.127-138.

Publisher

© Elsevier

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2014-10-08

Notes

This paper was published in the journal Additive Manufacturing and the definitive published version is available at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.addma.2014.09.003.

ISSN

2214-8604

Language

  • en

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