Manufacturing of Medical Implants by Combination of Selective Laser Melting and Laser Ablation

Abstract

The perfect fit of hip stem prostheses is supposed to have positive effects on their lifetime performance. Moreover, the ingrowth of tissue into the surface of the implant has to be assured to create a firm and load bearing contact. For the manufacturing of customized hip stem prostheses, the technology of Selective Laser Melting has shown promising results. Poor surface quality, however, makes it necessary to finish up the part by e.g., sand blasting or polishing. With the use of laser ablation for postprocessing, reproducible and functionalized surface morphologies might be achievable. Hence, with the motive to produce customized hip stem prostheses, a combined process chain for both mentioned laser technologies is developed. It is examined what type of surface should be produced at which part of the process chain. The produced implants should contain the demanded final surface characteristics without any conventional post-processing. Slight advantages for the Selective Laser Melting regarding the accuracy for different geometrical structures of 400 μm depth were observed. However, an overall improvement of surface quality after the laser ablation process in terms of osseointegration could be achieved. A complete laser based production of customized hip stem implants is found to be with good prospects.

Titanium Disulfide Based Saturable Absorber for Generating Passively Mode-Locked and Q-Switched Ultra-Fast Fiber Lasers

“…Due to the advantages of short pulse width, high peak power, simple structure, and excellent beam quality, pulsed fiber lasers have recently attracted significant attention because of their wide corresponding applications, such as medical treatment [ 1 , 2 ], fiber communications [ 3 , 4 ], environmental monitoring, and industry [ 5 , 6 , 7 ]. Passively mode-locked or Q-switched techniques are commonly-used efficient methods for generating ultra-fast pulsed lasers [ 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 ].…”

Effect of Titanium Based Alloys on Thermo-Mechanical Behavior in 3D Forging Simulation

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Novel strategy for quality improvement of up-facing inclined surfaces of LPBF parts by combining laser-induced shock waves and in situ laser remelting

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