Process optimisation in selective laser melting

The work presented here summarises part of the work I have done for the past six years. After a few interesting months of research on laser cutting of thick steel plates, I was lucky to land up in the emerging domain of Rapid Prototyping (RP): producing complex products layer by layer, directly from 3D CAD information. Basically, the evolution from 2D printing to 3D printing technology. One of the promising RP technologies at that time was Selective Laser Sintering of metal powders, but soon a new opportunity was discovered. Instead of laser sintering specially composed powders, resulting in fragile and porous parts, one could think of directly laser melting conventional, well known metal powders! This should result in strong and dense products produced in a single processing step. The idea of Selective Laser Melting was born; unfortunately the idea development was much faster than the technology development itself.
This thesis therefore focuses on the process development and subsequently the process optimisation of the Selective Laser Melting process and has a clear objective: development of a technology for producing high quality complex three dimensional metallic products.