Laser Additive Manufacturing of Seven Thousand Series Aluminum Aircraft Components (LAM-STAAC)

Alloys of aluminum in the 7000 series are known to have good weight, strength, and fatigue properties and are commonly used in Naval aircraft components. Recent manufacturing trends are increasingly focused on additive manufacturing (AM) methods as a way to reduce lead time, cost, and to improve part performance. Current additive manufacturing techniques are unable to fabricate parts in 7000 series aluminum alloys due to a lack of ideal thermal control to prevent defects. To address this, Optonicus proposed the use of an adaptive fiber-array laser system as the energy source for Laser Additive Manufacturing of Seven Thousand Series Aluminum Alloy Components (LAM-STAAC). Integration of this multi-beam laser source into a powder bed fusion system will provide flexibility in controlling the laser intensity distribution on the powder bed material. This will allow enhanced control of the thermal gradients during material processing to generate components that cost less, perform better, last longer, is lighter weight and cannot be manufactured any other way.