WEBINAR: “Progress & Current Challenges in Online Process Control for L-PBF”

Process control in Laser Powder bed Fusion (L-PBF) is often referred to as the holy grail for for industrial metal 3D printing. Though only offered by certain companies and machines, process control significantly reduces errors in printing which in turn results in much higher quality pieces. It is especially important to control the 3D printing processes when working with L-PBF, since it is such an industrial process. Not to mention an expensive one as it deals with metal particles, laser and heat, leaving no room for error. Additionally, process control is critical for producing high-quality metal parts for end-use applications in sectors like the automotive, aerospace and medical industries.

3Dnatives’ webinar “Progress & Current Challenges in Online Process Control for L-PBF”, took place on March 30th at 4PM CEST (10AM EDT), will allow attendees to learn more about process control in L-PBF, including how it works and how users can take advantage of it in their industrial printing. We were joined Dr. Yves Hagedorn, the CEO of Aconity3D as well as Ryan Sommerhuber, an Application Engineer from XARION Laser Acoustics. Aconity3D is one of the leading companies offering process control solutions in this field and XARION Laser Acoustics depend on process control solutions as they work on the world’s first membrane-free optical microphone without any moving parts.

This webinar showed efficient solutions for allowing reliable process control, ranging from  from full control of applied parameter sets to over automated inline process adaptations all the way to applying modifiable beam shapes for full temperature control. You will be able to learn about topics like how applied parameter sets may be accessed remotely via open Python API to enable customer specific build routines or off-line layer-to-layer parameter adaption. There was also a discussion on automated inline process control, wherein characteristics of a variety of different sensor types for extracting process information during the print are compared and a comprehensive approach for true inline process adaption is presented. You can find the replay of the webinar below.

Speakers:

Dr. Yves Hagedorn finished his studies in mechanical engineering, business administration and automation during his studies at the RWTH-Aachen and INSA Lyon (France). From 2009-2014, he worked at the Fraunhofer Institute for Laser Technology focusing on high-temperature LPBF, ending in his Ph.D degree. Since 2017, Yves has been the managing director of Aconity3D GmbH with a strong focus developing solutions for state of the art laser-based metal additive manufacturing.

Ryan Sommerhuber completed his first degree in material science at the University of Applied Sciences Koblenz (Germany) and then went on to complete a Master’s degree in Music Technology, focsuing on acoustics and recording engineering, at the Cork Institute of Technology (Ireland). In 2017, he joined XARION Laser Acoustics as an application engineer with a focus on acoustic process monitoring solutions based around the Optical Microphone technology.

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