Open your world to new materials, parts, and build rate

The LPBF manufacturing process challenges largely come from thermal management issues. Dyndrite enables you to account and compensate for the physical effects of laser-based 3D printing.

Success in LPBF depends on  balancing build rate vs material properties and physical process constraints as represented by the following energy density formula:

It all comes down to controlling the laser properties and toolpath geometries and sorting in a deliberately specified order to have better thermal management. Too little energy leads to a lack of fusion and melt process instability. Too much energy leads to overheating, material evaporation, keyhole porosity, and distortion.

The Dyndrite LPBF software provides the tools you need to optimize the build rate, material properties, and physical process for maximal throughput and part quality.

Dyndrite allows you to design toolpaths for following challenges:

• Inefficient laser utilization creates suboptimal build rate and final part cost
• Sophisticated multi laser scheduling and sorting, and assignment is needed for machine efficiency. Multiple lasers need to work well together, either on
• Lots of smaller parts
• One large part
• Managing stitching zones to maintain material properties
• Variable or large layer heights and different hatch strategies based on segment type (core, upskin, downskin, etc.) for build rate. For example:
• Skip layers with coarse hatches in the core and high laser power and speed, enable high build rate
• Low power and and closely spaced hatches may be required near the surface to maintain surface finish
• Path planning/trajectory planning using metadata to minimize jump times/distances
• More accurate build time estimation
• Melt pool instability and weld bead instability.
• Keyhole porosity (over melting)
• Balling (under melting, unstable weld bead)
• Lack of fusion porosity (under melting)
• All of the above lead to degraded part properties
• Gasflow and lasing direction-based spatter and plume cloud formation 
• Spatter due to lasing direction
• Convection in the melt pool causes circulation and the gasflow shears droplets out of the melt pool causing spatter
• When scanning upwind the spatter gets blown downwind, eliminating the need to weld over a spatter-covered surface
• Lasing in a single direction results in anisotropic material properties
• Gasflow differences between machines and build layouts
• Based on angle of incidence of the laser and the part, different results are achieved
• Different results due to angle of incidence of the laser and the part. Desirable to choose a lasing direction based on features (fine features, upskin, downskin, etc.)
• Downskins downwind are treated differently than downskins that are upwind due to gas flow causing differences in spatter. Controlling the sort order of downskins is critical to account for this.
• Thermal management: part and powder interactions (downskins, and upskins)
• Heat travels differently depending on the conduction area with powder vs already welded thermal mass. The user must be able to assign different tool path parameters based on downskins or distance to the surface of the part while sorting to address conduction area constraints
• For example print inskin first, then downskin. Then build progressively out. Start heat sink so that the energy goes into the part
• Users wish to prevent dross, powder agglomeration, stalactites, and subsurface porosity for better material properties
• Thermal management: thermal gradients and layer history:
• Discontinuities in layer area can result in excessive cooling rates or heat retention
• Low thermal gradients lead to less deformation, warping, and residual stress
• High cooling rates tend to produce finer grains
• Supports being required to manage distortion and thermal time history. 
• Sophisticated laser parameters can reduce the need for the following support strategies which in turn minimize post processing/support removal:
• Thermal heatsinks
• Structural stiffness 
• Backstop for the laser from a powder laser standpoint
• Recoater issues due to distortion caused by thermal management problems 
• When thermal gradients are not managed properly, part distortion in the z direction may occur. Such distortions may interfere with the recoater either causing damage to the recoater or part failure