SELECTIVE LASER MELTING FOR MEDICAL APPLICATIONS

Laser additive technology of free-form manufacturing of objects from functionally graded materials represents promising direction to solve challenging medical problems: (a) medical applications require exclusive design and individual functionally for each single case; (b) biocompatibilily and biointegration of a porous implant in the living tissue depend strong v on its surface structure. Selective Laser Melting makes it possible to create fully functional parts directly from metals without using any intermediate binders or any additional processing steps. Experiments were carried out on PHENIX PM100 machine with different metal powders: stainless steel grades 904L, 316L, CoCr, Inconel 625. The influence of different manufacturing strategies on the internal structure and mechanical properties of samples was analysed. The following features were studied: (a) specially structured surface, (b) miniaturized and (c) regular porous structures.