Potential of Scanning-Strategy Adaptations for Producing Homogenous Microlattices by PBF-LB

For a sustainable production and increasing energy demands, physically smaller and more efficient heat exchangers are required. Hence, one challenge is to increase the surface area to volume ratio, therefore enabling the production of finer structures. Additive Manufacturing (AM) enables the efficient production of advanced heat exchangers. Especially Laser Powder Bed Fusion (PBF-LB/M) increases in industrial interest with continuously growing readiness level. The structure size in PBF-LB is limited by melt pool size and directional inhomogeneities, using equal strategies as for bulk solid components. To overcome this, the scalability potential and alteration of a single contour strategy was investigated on 316L to compensate geometric deviations during design phase. This also enables the possibility to explicitly adjust boundary parameters for compensating the directional overmelting of individual inclined struts. Thus, this approach showed a viably strategy to reduce geometric inaccuracies, enabling a predictable manufacturing of homo-genous microlattices.