CT-based quality control of Laser Sintering of Polymers

In this work a test artifact containing cylindrical elements with diameters in the range typically used in lightweight cellular structures is used to investigate the influence of features' size and printing orientation on the porosity and shape deviation of each feature. In order to assess the reproducibility of the process, several replicas of the test object are produced in polyamide-12 (PA12) using the same LS process conditions. An X-ray Computed Tomography (CT)-based quality control approach, which uses both image processing of CT-slices and porosity analysis (porosity content, pores count and pores volume distributions) is used to gather the information.