Developing an ingenious hybrid additive-subtractive manufacturing route for producing biomedical implants via metal AM processes and laser post-processing

About the Project

3 Year Self funded project

This PhD project will ignite an exciting new research area involving hybrid additive-subtractive manufacturing (AM-SM) routes for the fabrication of biomedical implants economically to meet the growing demand of biomedical industries. In particular, the novel hybrid AM-SM process route will combine laser-based powder bed fusion (LPBF)/binder jetting and laser post-processing techniques, such as laser surface texturing (LST) and laser polishing (LP).

LPBF/binder jetting technique will be used to produce porous structures inside the produced implants with a desired porosity level (~30%). An outermost dense structure will also be fabricated using different LPBF settings to emulate human bone structures. Since LPBF-built surfaces typically possess higher surface roughness (~10-20 μm), laser post-processing techniques (LST, LP) will be subsequently employed to achieve sub-micron surface roughness (<0.5 μm) on the outermost layers of the implants. It is further envisaged that the surface cracks, defects would be eliminated by employing LP which would ultimately improve the parts’ surface integrity.

The student will be working within the High-Value Manufacturing Group’s two major research labs - Additive Manufacturing and Micro and Nano-manufacturing.