Temporal pulse shaping for smoothing of printed metal surfaces

Abstract

The surfaces of laser-induced forward transfer (LIFT) printed metal structures show typical roughness characteristic of the metal droplet size (3 to 10 μm). Submicron voids are often observed in the bulk of such printed metal structures with consequences on the mechanical strength, chemical resistivity, and electrical conductivity. We present the results of our efforts to reduce surface roughness and bulk voids by controlled laser melting. We have used temporally shaped pulses from a fiber laser tunable in the range from 1 to 600 ns in order to improve the quality of LIFT printed copper and aluminum structures. For the best case shown, roughness was improved from R RMS ¼ 0.8 μm to R RMS ¼ 0.2 μm and the relative percentage of the voids was reduced from 7.3% to 0.9%. Downloaded From: http://opticalengineering.spiedigitallibrary.org/ on 05/16/2015 Terms of Use: http://spiedl.org/terms

Laser Transfer of Metals and Metal Alloys for Digital Microfabrication of 3D Objects

“…While we concentrated our attention in this article on printing only copper and copper alloys, other metals are also printable by using a similar parameter regime. In our labs, we have already LIFT printed gold, silver, and aluminum; all obey the same basic rules as described above.…”

3D Printing at Micro-Level: Laser-Induced Forward Transfer and Two-Photon Polymerization

“…Micro-materials Nanotubes [25] Graphene [26] Particulates [27,28] Metallic material Metals [29,30] Gel-type material Inks [31][32][33][34] LIFT is a single action DLW technique, which can deposit the localized micro-patterns of almost every material. Sensitive materials can be printed without changing their properties.…”

[INVITED] Laser-induced forward transfer: A high resolution additive manufacturing technology

“…Successfully LIFT-printed materials include deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) [7], active optical structure [8,9], polymers [10,11], biomaterials [12,13], nanotubes [14], graphene [15], metals [16,17], particles [18,19] and inks [20][21][22][23]. This process is a single-step direct printing technique that offers the ability to perform surface micro patterning and localized deposition of almost any material.…”