Direct fabrication of multiple material systems – Beginning to understand the issues associated with this technology advancement

The Laser Engineered Net Shaping (LENS) process is continuing to evolve from a research development project to a technology that is useful for a variety of applications. This process has the ability to produce geometrically complex components in high performance metals with full density directly from a CAD solid model. These components are now being used for functional testing to reduce the development time for new products. Other capabilities provided through this process allow a significant reduction in cooling time for an injection mold to be reduced significantly. In addition, the cooling provided can be distributed to be very uniform providing reduced stress and distortion in the final molded components. As this technology continues to advance, it has become quite apparent that method for producing three-dimensional structures has a great deal of potential to also produce functional components using multiple materials. Several structures have now been produced using multiples in a stepwise or gradient fashion with good success. To take this facet of the laser-based technology to the manufacturing environment, issues associated with multiple material structures must be identified and understood. This report provides an overview of the state-of-the-art for the LENS process and begins a discussion based on processing experiences on what issues maybe important as processing of multiple material structures is explored.The Laser Engineered Net Shaping (LENS) process is continuing to evolve from a research development project to a technology that is useful for a variety of applications. This process has the ability to produce geometrically complex components in high performance metals with full density directly from a CAD solid model. These components are now being used for functional testing to reduce the development time for new products. Other capabilities provided through this process allow a significant reduction in cooling time for an injection mold to be reduced significantly. In addition, the cooling provided can be distributed to be very uniform providing reduced stress and distortion in the final molded components. As this technology continues to advance, it has become quite apparent that method for producing three-dimensional structures has a great deal of potential to also produce functional components using multiple materials. Several structures have now been produced using multiples in a stepwise or gradien...