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.