How Area Printing® Works

When we look back throughout history, there are moments where innovations and technologies create sea change for industries. The printing press. The assembly line. The semiconductor. Incredible transformations for production and value previously unheard of at their time of adoption. For metal Additive Manufacturing, Area Printing will serve as a historical turning point for an industry now equipped with limitless capabilities.

Area Printing by the numbers.

There are a select number of profitable and AM serial production applications which can be found in the energy, medical, and aerospace sectors. Besides these high-end industries, the technology has reached a limited adoption rate. The main reason is neither due to lack of knowledge or poor performance of the technology, but rather it lays in the high total cost of ownership. Today's established metal AM technologies such as Laser Powder Bed Fusion (L-PBF) and Electron Beam Melting (EBM) cost between 1-2 $/cm³. To be competitive with traditional serial manufacturing, the cost must be reduced by more than a factor of 10 to less then 0.1 $/cm³.

How Area Printing works.

1

Beam shaping of pulsed IR laser source to create a homogenous square field.

2

Generating projection of area pattern with blue light projector at same size as square laser beam. Aligning both light beams.

3

Polarizing the IR laser beam horizontally where blue and IR light “pixels” are overlapping via optically- addressable light valve (OALV). Polarizing vertically where IR and blue are not overlapping.

4

Splitting vertically and horizontally polarized IR laser beams. Resulting in area pattern further processed through scanner system to melt powderbed in patterned field.