Advanced and Future Development of Laser Powder Bed Fusion

As one of the mainstream metal additive manufacturing (AM) technologies, laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) technique, there are four main problems at present: (1) the size of the formed parts is small, unable to meet the market demands for large-size parts, and the future development trend requires more and more size, such as aerospace, shipbuilding industry. (2) The dimensional precision of the formed products can not be compared with the products produced by CNC machine tools. (3) The forming efficiency is generally slow at present, for example, some large parts need one or two months to form, and if the situation occurs during the forming, the whole part will be scrapped, causing huge losses, therefore, the efficiency is currently restricting the development of AM. (4) A machine can only use one type of material to form parts, but in fact, there may be many different functional requirements in a part and that different positions may have different material requirements.