LIA NEWS Preview of the 2018 Laser Additive
Manufacturing conference By Dr Ron D Schaeffer, technical consultant to PhotoMachining
L
aser additive manufacturing (LAM) is one of the most exciting potential growth areas for the laser industry. Te market has been watched for a few years and every year there
are gains in the revenue generated by this market segment, but so far the revenue curve has not started rising dramatically. Tis can be viewed as both good and bad news. Te ‘bad’ news is that the market has not exploded ... yet! According to Allen Nogee, from Strategies Unlimited, the industry can be broken down as follows: Stereolithography: Reasonable growth, but the
industry depends on more non-laser solutions. Laser sintering (DMLS/SLS): Tis area is
growing strongly. Tere are two main application areas: plastics and metals. Plastics suffer from the availability of a variety of materials and usually use CO2 and diode lasers with under 300W of output power. High-speed sintering (HSS): Tis is a newer
technology and is used primarily for plastics. Te technique is 10 to 100 times faster than SLS and can manufacture many tens of thousands of units per day. At the time of this writing, metals are not yet there, but time may change that. Te good news is that the LAM market is set to
really ramp up and could spike in the next couple of years. Terefore, it is a great time to investigate LAM (and thereby the LAM conference) to get in on the ground floor of the technology. While this conference has been around for 10 years, this year the venue has moved to Schaumburg, Illinois, for the first time, and is co-located with the Lasers in Manufacturing Event (LME) with overlap on 28 March. Te conference takes place at the Schaumburg Convention Centre on 27-28 March. Te LAM chairs will return to build on its
successful programme from last year. Milan Brandt of RMIT University will continue as the
DIARY
Laser Additive Manufacturing Conference (LAM): 27-28 March, Schaumburg, Illinois, USA
Lasers for Manufacturing Event (LME): 28-29 March, Schaumburg, Illinois, USA
Industrial Laser Conference: 12 September, at the International Manufacturing Technology Show, Chicago, USA
30 LASER SYSTEMS EUROPE ISSUE 38 • SPRING 2018
general chair, with John Hunter of LPW Technology, and Minlin Zhong of Tsinghua University, serving as conference co-chairs.
Day one A representative from America Makes will give the first keynote address, titled: ‘Smart collaboration: a public-private approach to advancing the additive manufacturing industry’. America Makes strives in AM and 3D printing technology research, discovery, creation and innovation to increase global manufacturing competitiveness. Other presentations range in
can help with the widespread use of AM technologies by providing a framework to better understand AM processes from the particle and melt pool scales. Day one will wrap up with presentations on
is that the LAM market is set to really ramp up
topics from laser cladding to laser welding. Prabu Balu, of Coherent, will discuss recent advances in laser cladding. Balu is the senior application engineer at Coherent. His talk will provide a set of guidelines to successfully deposit highly reflective materials using powder-based laser cladding (LC), high deposition rate (up to 10 kg/hr) with minimal dilution (as low as 1 per cent) using hot-wire based LC, and thin coating thicknesses (varying from 25µm to 500µm) using ultra-high- speed LC. Paree Allu, CFD engineer at Flow Science, will
give a presentation on computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modelling for AM and laser welding. Allu will explain how CFD modelling
The good news
process monitoring, featuring John Lehman, from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and his talk on novel developments in process monitoring at NIST. Lehman is the leader of the sources and detectors research group at NIST and a fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Te research group provides laser power and energy meter
calibrations to the US and much of the world.
Day two Keynote speaker Ehsan Toyserkani, from the University of Waterloo, will kick off day two with an overview of Canada’s additive manufacturing initiatives. Toyserkani is the founder of, and research director for, the MSAM lab at the University of Waterloo, the university research chair for additive manufacturing, and a professor in the department of mechanical and mechatronics engineering. His presentation will cover the challenges and
opportunities related to a research programme on novel in- and off-line quality monitoring of
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