Recently, additive manufacturing is making a big impact across a variety of engineering disciplines and consumer markets. Basically it is the process of building up structures layer by layer. The process allows for the opportunity of incorporating valuable internal features into structural components during their manufacturing.
A team at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland has embedded fiber-optic sensors directly into 316-grade stainless steel structures during manufacture using selective laser melting (SLM). This is ground-breaking and relevant to the global stainless steel and optics industries because it represents a valuable means to build intelligent materials and structures that would be able to monitor their environment and report back.
Working in collaboration with European partners as part of the Oxigen Project under the European Commission’s FP7 research umbrella, the team successfully embedded nickel-coated fiber-optic sensors into stainless steel coupons. Although the principle of laying a fiber-optic sensor in an appropriate position while the SLM operation solidifies metal powder around it is relatively straightforward, the practical difficulties of accurate positioning and avoiding damage to the sensor are large. SLM improves matters through the use of high-brightness and small-spot-size fiber lasers, allowing close control of the energy being delivered both to the fiber-optic sensors and to their immediate vicinity.
The team is also working on ways to transfer the process onto a commercial system.