Professor Hu Yaowu and his team at Wuhan University’s School of Integrated Circuits have made significant progress in metal additive manufacturing, proposing an innovative approach to address porosity defects and dynamic control of the melt pool interface in metal fusion additive manufacturing.

Their latest study, Robust melt pool laser-shock-vibration assisted hybrid laser powder bed fusion and its mechanism, published in the journal Additive Manufacturing, introduces a highly robust and reliable method for 3D printing metal structural components.

Building on their previous research, Porosity reduction by co-axial laser shock modulation of molten pool in powder-bed selective laser sintering: take widely-used stainless steel as an example, the team used synchronous coaxial laser shock forces to enhance the stability of the keyhole in laser powder bed fusion (LPBF/SLS), developing and validating a scalable approach for improving the robustness and stability of the keyhole in LPBF/SLS processes.

By coupling low-cost fiber nanosecond lasers with continuous forming lasers, they introduce periodic mechanical disturbances into the keyhole during the LPBF process.

Experimental results show that this method reduces severe spatter and material ejection behaviors, improving internal defect characteristics such as porosity volume fraction, pore size, and sphericity.