Qualification of Laser Sintering Serial Production

Motivation
The superior motivation of the project “qualification of serial production by laser sintering” is to enhance laser sintering more and more to a serial production process. LS has many factors which can influence the process like shown in figure 1. It is essential for a serial production process to achieve high accuracy as well as reproducibility and actually there is no general qualification procedure and quality management concept for LS serial production to handle these influencing factors in a common way. Presently, the users of LS machines, and in particular unexperienced users, need to develop their own internal qualification procedure to decide whether a serial production of a concrete part is possible or not and they also need to develop a quality management concept to build quality parts for their customers continuously.

Aim
The overall aim is to develop a guideline for the qualification procedure of serial production by laser sintering which shall be adjusted to different industries. A catalog of measures along the process chain shall be developed as well to achieve high quality and reproducibility properties of laser sintered parts.