Melt pool monitoring for laser beam melting of metals: assistance for material qualification for the stainless steel 1.4057

Laser Beam Melting of Metals (LBM-M) is an additive manufacturing technique that is successfully applied for the manufacturing of complex parts, small batch series and prototypes. In LBM metallic parts are generated layer by layer directly from sliced CAD data. For each layer a thin powder layer is deposited and subsequently, irradiated by a focused laser beam, which is guided by a galvanometer scanner. A major drawback of this relatively new manufacturing technology is a limited material portfolio. Today, the whole procedure of material qualification is time-consuming and resource intensive because a fast and reliable modelling of the process is not yet possible. In this work we are going to show the results of a qualification procedure applying a coaxial melt pool monitoring system to determine suitable processing parameters for a material, which has not yet been processed. In this work, a stainless steel material was exemplarily used to proof the feasibility. Furthermore, we are discussing the usability of this methodology for the material qualification in LBM-M in general.