Additive Manufacturing of Glass

Additive manufacturing has shown potential for manufacturing parts out of metals, plastics and even ceramics. This paper reports on Selective Laser Melting (SLM) for depositing glass which has significantly different material properties from metals, ceramics or polymers. A CO₂ laser is used to locally melt portions of a powder bed to explore the effects of process parameters on stationary particle formation as well as continuous line quality. Numerical modeling is also applied to gain insight into the physical process. The experimental and numerical results indicate that the absorptivity of the glass powder is nearly constant with respect to the processing parameters. Finally we show that higher quality parts can be created using a wire-fed instead of powder-bed process. Industrially, the additive manufacturing of glass is potentially relevant for gradient index optics, systems with embedded optics and applications where glass is used to form a hermetic seal.