Selective laser melting

Selective laser melting (SLM) is a particular rapid prototyping, 3D printing, or Additive Manufacturing (AM) technique designed to use a high power-density laser to melt and fuse metallic powders together. In many SLM is considered to be a subcategory of Selective Laser Sintering (SLS). SLM process has the abelity to fully melt the metal material into a solid 3D-dimentinal part unlike Selective Laser Sintering.

Selective laser melting started in 1995 at the Fraunhofer Institute ILT in Aachen, Germany, with a German research project, resulting in the so-called basic ILT SLM patent DE 19649865. Already during its pioneering phase Dr. Dieter Schwarze and Dr. Matthias Fockele from F&S Stereolithographietechnik GmbH located in Paderborn collaborated with the ILT researchers Dr. Wilhelm Meiners and Dr. Konrad Wissenbach. In the early 2000s F&S entered into a commercial partnership with MCP HEK GmbH (later on named MTT Technology GmbH and then SLM Solutions GmbH) located in Luebeck in northern Germany. Today Dr. Dieter Schwarze is with SLM Solutions GmbH and Dr. Matthias Fockele founded Realizer GmbH.

The ASTM International F42 standards committee has grouped selective laser melting into the category of "laser sintering", although this is an acknowledged misnomer because the process fully melts the metal into a solid homogeneous mass, unlike selective laser sintering (SLS) and direct metal laser sintering (DMLS), which are true sintering processes. A similar process is electron beam melting (EBM), which uses an electron beam as energy source.

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