High Productivity With Laser Beam Splitting in Powder Bed Fusion for Multiple Similar Parts

This paper evaluates a highly productive laser-based additive manufacturing process using beam multiplication by investigation of the influences on build quality of 316L stainless-steel parts with different compensation strategies. Many of the current approaches to increase productivity in powder bed fusion with laser beam for metals have resulted in substantial increases in investments for multiple laser-scanner systems or tend to come with the necessity to decrease the quality or resolution of build parts to introduce higher laser power parameter sets. To address these challenges, an alternative approach of increasing the productivity is the use of a beam splitter to build multiple parts simultaneously with a single laser scanner system. While this approach enables higher achievable build rates per laser, it leads to certain differences in the quality-determining properties of the build parts, which are investigated in this work. Therefore, the differences in properties are analysed by density, roughness, and positioning accuracy of the parts. This demonstrates the potential of compensation for optical errors in additive manufacturing with a beam splitter for the purpose of enabling higher productivity to increase the viability of series production for similar parts.