Effect of after fabrication cooling cycles in geometric and dimensioning accuracy of products in selective laser sintering process

目前提案的工业合作伙伴Anubis制造咨询公司是安大略一家提供增材制造服务的领先公司。Anubis是一家制造公司，能够为各种行业提供高精度增材制造产品，包括汽车行业，模具和工具制造商，自动化和机器人等。Anubis使用最先进的选择性激光烧结（SLS）工艺来生产高精度的复杂零件。通常，SLS工艺中的生产前置时间的很大一部分被需要在制造工艺之后立即进行的成品的两个冷却循环所占用。在通过SLS工艺生产零件后，它们需要两个阶段的冷却循环，其中零件可以设置。第1阶段在温暖条件下在绝缘机器内执行;第2阶段在环境条件下在机器外执行。通常，进行完整的冷却循环需要机器上大量的停机时间和能源效率低下，并增加了批量生产时间。该项目的目标是减少整体生产提前期，提高生产效率和实际机器的运行时间。减少冷却周期时间而不损失最终产品的几何和尺寸精度是实现上述目标的选定方法。

The industrial partner of the current proposal, Anubis Manufacturing Consulting, is a leading company providing additive manufacturing services in Ontario. Anubis is a Manufacturing company capable in providing high precision additive manufacturing products to a variety of industries including automotive industries, dies and tools manufacturer, automation and robotics, etc. Anubis uses a state-of-the art Selective Laser Sintering (SLS) process to produce complex parts with a high level of precision. Typically, a significant portion of the production lead-time in SLS process is taken by two cooling cycles of the finished products that needs to be conducted right after the fabrication process. After parts have been produced via the SLS process, they require the two phases of cooling cycles in which the parts may set. Phase 1 is performed within the insulated machine in warm conditions; Phase 2 is performed outside the machine in ambient conditions. Commonly, conducting the full cooling cycles requires a great deal of downtime and energy inefficiency on the machines and increases the batch production time. The objective of this project is to reduce the overall production lead time and also improve the efficiency of the production and actual machines' operational time. Reducing the cooling cycle time without losing the geometric and dimensional accuracies of the final products is the selected approach to achieve the above mentioned objectives.