LIA NEWS
helped the company tailor data points to specific AM technologies, cutting file sizes up to 80 per cent for its 20 AM machines (13 for plastics and seven for metals). Meanwhile, Linear, founded in 2003, claims to
own the most AM machines of any service provider in North America and runs 11 materials on those machines, according to Bruce Colter, director of new business development. ‘We just recently cracked the code on how to do production in the metals business,’ Colter noted, turning out 20 to 50 parts a month. ‘Tat’s kind of the holy grail everybody’s looking to get to. A lot of people make parts; our focus in 2014 and going forward is that we are going to try to take this from being cool technology – and we are going to try to start making money for our clients.’ Using additively produced conformal cooling
and heating inserts, Linear improves profitability by reducing cycle times and sometimes eliminating a machine or two for a given process. ‘We use SLM machines to grow inserts that chase hot spots in mould and tooling applications,’ Colter explained. ‘It’s one of our most requested pieces of business.’ Te company, with three facilities in Livonia, has been fielding 15 to 20 calls per month about the technology, Colter said. A major success for Linear was using its conformal inserts to improve the moulding of a customer’s speaker grills – significantly reducing scrap and dramatically extending production time. With a goal of 350,000 parts per year, the manufacturer had only been able to run 12 shots at a time before parts started warping; Linear extended production time to 11 hours. Meanwhile, Linear has also grown, welded and shipped a Cadillac ELR sun-roof surround in seven days and produced a carbon fibre and titanium drive shaſt for Formula-student race cars that was 73 per cent lighter than a steel drive shaſt.
For those interested in more traditional
cladding for repair, case studies were abundant. Kenneth Meinert, of Penn State’s Applied Research Lab and facilities manager at the Center for Innovative Materials Processing through Direct Digital Deposition (CIMP-3D), detailed several AM successes: repairing torpedo systems used in repeated training exercises; tripling the life of aircraſt carrier trough covers from 10 years to 30; restoring high-value machinery shaſts; and cladding steel struts for earth-moving equipment. CIMP-3D director Richard Martukanitz discussed the facility’s success with repairing high-value Department of Defense components featuring carburized or chromium-plated surfaces. Nick Wald, general manager of RPM
Innovations in Rapid City, SD, detailed how the business — spun off on 1 January 2013, to fully separate laser-based operations from mining- focused RPM & Associates — does about 70 per cent of its work in aerospace and defence. RPM is pursuing certification for more aerospace production and has built parts about 4 feet tall and 60 to 80 inches long on custom-made equipment running lasers of 1 to 4 kilowatts. However, Wald noted that RPM equipment has travel capability of 5 feet (X axis) by 5 feet (Y) by 7 feet (Z). Meanwhile, of the variety of shaſts RPM repairs, Wald noted a power plant atomizer shaſt that spins at 8,800 rpm. RPM’s customer was repairing the shaſts — which reside in large housings and require days to extract and fix — every seven or eight months. RPM began repairing the shaſts about seven years ago with 420 stainless steel; the shaſts now last five to six years. And Jelmer Brugman of Hornet Laser
Cladding in the Netherlands said steam turbine casings it fixed onsite for Stork showed no sign of
wear two years aſter repair of severe erosion. Be it powder-bed or powder-fed processing,
residual stress reduction remains a key hurdle, said David Keicher of Sandia National Laboratories in his day two keynote address. Keicher, who invented Laser Engineered Net Shaping (LENS) technology and commercialized it at Optomec, emphasized that powder-fed processes allow a more unique mix of materials and alloys with properties approaching forged/wrought.
THE FINAL WORD For first-time and repeat attendees alike, LAM 2014 delivered high-quality content and excellent opportunities to connect with customers. It was the second time at LAM for Kegan
Luick of Caterpillar. ‘I do remanufacturing applications, and I’m looking to learn what other people are doing in that space,’ he said. ‘We see everything from Inconel to cast iron to titanium. Everything (LAM presenters) talked about so far has been quite good.’ Another returning participant, Kyle Taylor of
Wolf Robotics in Fort Collins, CO, saw ‘a lot more industry here this time. Some of our key customers were coming, so it’s a good idea to come out and make sure we get the same information (and) we’re able to share with them’. Martin Konkel, head of production for optical
components for Trumpf in Cranbury, NJ, ventured to LAM for the first time ‘as a potential customer. I’m looking into the options of SLM for manufacturing parts in-house — potentially for heat-sink components. My colleague said I should be going to see what’s out there and what the market is doing.’ lTo view some of the presentations given at LAM 2014, visit
www.lia.org/lam.
ILSC 2015: Preparing you for the challenges of today’s technological advancements and their impact on laser safety
O 52
n the heels of significant revisions to two parent laser safety standards, the Laser Institute of America’s biennial International Laser Safety Conference
(ILSC®) from 23 to 26 March in Albuquerque, NM, will again showcase best practice in industrial and medical photonics applications.
LASER SYSTEMS EUROPE ISSUE 23 • SUMMER 2014 Chaired again by Ben Rockwell from Fort
Sam, Houston, TX, ILSC 2015 promises to devote significant time to focusing on new guidelines in the just-revised ANSI Z136.1- 2014 and IEC 60825 standards for laser safety. Rockwell says the conference has ‘topics
from the very basic, fundamental laser safety – for example, the best way to do calculations,
the best way to read select standards and make your personal interpretations and apply those standards – to very advanced topics like fume extraction, what the latest maximum permissible exposure changes are, and how those are relevant to the bioeffects that really occur in the human’. ILSC will follow its traditional format of
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www.lasersystemseurope.com
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