The laser forming of metallic components using particulate materials

Direct fabrication technology, which utilizes computer-aided design solid models to automatically control the manufacture of functional piece parts, is rapidly gaining popularity as a means to significantly reduce the time to market of new concepts. Since the introduction of stereolithography in 1982, several different vapid prototyping technologies have evolved using surrogate rather than actual materials of construction. Most recently, researchers have begun to develop laser-based methods to obtain fully dense metallic components directly from a computer-aided design solid model. Each of these methods is unique, but possesses aspects that ave similar to the others. Many of these methods hold a great deal of promise for applications; however, none have been developed into a commercial product.