Experimental Analysis of the Direct Laser Metal Deposition Process

In the current economic situation, with a liberalized and worldwide trade, the weight of time and costs reduction for developing new products increases. In particular, the tooling processes, which are already expensive and time consuming, recently became a critical trouble. The geometric complexity, the number of variants and the amount of requirements that characterize the products that are required by market increase this trouble. Reducing time to market and the international competitiveness are two of the biggest challenges for manufacturing companies of the twenty-first century. They not only have to produce component with high quality, low cost and better functionality than before, but also have to respond to customer requests in a more reactive way as possible. To do this they have to accelerate, of course, the tooling stage and to reduce processing times. Indeed, it is known that a delay of some weeks during the development and the commercialization of a new product may result in a loss of profits of 30%. These factors thrust the manufacturing companies to find solutions both in technology and in organization. The Material Accretion Manufacturing (MAM), consisting of additive technologies, and the modern operational structures, such as those provided by the Concurrent Engineering, are effective tools that help to reduce time and costs. Probably, they are the best weapons that western industry can take to survive the fierce competition with those countries, mainly asiatic and eastern europe countries, where labor has a very low cost, but is nowadays able to achieve good quality products. Among the various technologies MAM, thanks to which it is possible to apply the basic concepts of Rapid Prototyping to realize finished products, stands out, with its huge capacity, the Direct Laser Metal Deposition (DLMD) process of metal powders. But what are the key features of this process? What are the properties of the products it is able to accomplish? For what types of applications have already been used or are expected to do it? This chapter will give a comprehensive answer to these questions. The DLMD pertain the group of technologies called Material Accretion Manufacturing (MAM), and, in particular, is based on the principles of rapid prototyping (RP) and laser cladding (Peng et al., 2005). The MAM technologies start by the 3D design to get the object in a single pass through an additive processing, that is overlapping each other layers with a small thickness. Other words, there is a conversion of the three-dimensional piece into N two-dimensional overlapping pieces, that constitute the layers.