The purpose of this paper is to outline some key aspects such as material systems used, phenomenological and statistical process modeling, techniques applied to monitor the process and optimization approaches reported. All these need to be taken into account for the ongoing development of the SLM technique, particularly in health care applications. The outcomes from this review allow not only to summarize the main features of the process but also to collect a considerable amount of investigation effort so far achieved by the researcher community.,This paper reviews four significant areas of the selective laser melting (SLM) process of metallic systems within the scope of medical devices as follows: established and novel materials used, process modeling, process tracking and quality evaluation, and finally, the attempts for optimizing some process features such as surface roughness, porosity and mechanical properties. All the consulted literature has been highly detailed and discussed to understand the current and existing research gaps.,With this review, there is a prevailing need for further investigation on copper alloys, particularly when conformal cooling, antibacterial and antiviral properties are sought after. Moreover, artificial intelligence techniques for modeling and optimizing the SLM process parameters are still at a poor application level in this field. Furthermore, plenty of research work needs to be done to improve the existent online monitoring techniques.,This review is limited only to the materials, models, monitoring methods, and optimization approaches reported on the SLM process for metallic systems, particularly those found in the health care arena.,SLM is a widely used metal additive manufacturing process due to the possibility of elaborating complex and customized tridimensional parts or components. It is corroborated that SLM produces minimal amounts of waste and enables optimal designs that allow considerable environmental advantages and promotes sustainability.,The key perspectives about the applications of novel materials in the field of medicine are proposed.,The investigations about SLM contain an increasing amount of knowledge, motivated by the growing interest of the scientific community in this relatively young manufacturing process. This study can be seen as a compilation of relevant researches and findings in the field of the metal printing process.

Selective laser melting: lessons from medical devices industry and other applications

Theoretical evolution of thermal behaviour of Ti-6Al-4V subjected to selective laser melting: A powder free approach

In this paper, the temperature distribution in a slab was investigated. A model based on the Boltzmann transport equation without heat source was simplified using the Bhatnagar-Gross-Krook (BGK) approximation was applied. This is an example of the Lattice Boltzmann Method. The model was developed based on using a D2Q4 lattice arrangement for the medium of study. To obtain results, the model was tested on different cases: Two box-shaped slabs with different boundary conditions, and a T-shaped and an L-shaped slabs to determine the temperature distributions different times t > 0. The results obtained based on the developed model were validated with the enterprise software COMSOL Multiphysics which is based on the Finite Element Method. For the two cases of box-shaped and the T-shaped slabs, their results were in nearly perfect agreement with the finite element method. However, for the L-shaped slab, there was good agreement at most points apart from the regions where there was change of shape. In conclusion there is high agreement between the results of LBM and using COMSOL, which proves that LBM can be used to determine temperature distribution in a slab accurately.

Investigation of Temperature Distribution in a Slab Using Lattice Boltzmann Method

Polymers are very interesting and useful materials that have many applications in various areas of engineering. Composites formed with these materials are known to exhibit outstanding mechanical, electrical, and thermal properties. In this work, a polymer, epoxy resin, was reinforced with a biodegradable material, periwinkle shell (PWS) particles, using the hand lay-up method. The PWS was pulverized using a ball mill and three sieve sizes of the PWS (75, 150, and 300 µm) were sieved out. Various samples of the composite were produced by reinforcing the epoxy resin matrix with 10, 20, 30, 40, and 50 wt% of each of the PWS particle sieve sizes. The samples so formed were subjected to the following mechanical tests: hardness, tensile, compressive, and impact tests. It was found out that the samples of composites showed higher values of the parameters tested for than ordinary epoxy resin showed. In the samples of composites, it was found that the samples with a higher weight percentage of the PWS reinforcement recorded higher values of those mechanical properties tested for. The higher the weight percentage of the PWS in the composite, the greater the value of the mechanical property tested for.

Effect of particle size and weight percentage variation on the mechanical properties of periwinkle shell reinforced polymer (epoxy resin) matrix composite

Adedoyin M. Lasisi

Papers

Computational modelling of laser additive manufactured (LAM) Titanium alloy grade 5