Renishaw Plc

Michael Joseph McClelland

Ceri Brown

Ravi Guttamindapalli Aswathanarayanaswamy

Ramkumar Revanur

An additive manufacturing apparatus including a build chamber, build platform lowerable in the chamber so layers of flowable material can successively form across the platform, laser for generating a laser beam, scanning unit for directing the laser beam onto each layer to selectively solidify the material and a processor for controlling the scanning unit. The processor controls the scanning unit directs the laser beam to solidify a selected area of material by advancing the laser beam many times along a scan path. On each pass, the laser beam solidifies spaced apart sections of the scan path, each subsequent pass solidifying sections that are located between sections solidified on a previous pass. The processor controls the scanning unit to direct the laser beam to solidify selected area of material by solidifying sub-millimetre sized sections of non-continuously area and in an order such that consecutively solidified sections are spaced apart.

Additive manufacturing apparatus and methods

A device and method for generating scan data and/or slice data for use in an additive manufacturing process, in which an energy beam is scanned across layers of flowable material to consolidate the material in a layer-by-layer manner to build a part. The device includes a display and a processor. The processor is arranged to determine scan data for slices and/or slices of the part to be built in the additive manufacturing process and cause the display to display scan data and/or slices that has been determined whilst determining scan data for other ones of the slices and/or other ones of the slices from the geometric data.

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Stoke-on-Trent, United Kingdom

Michael Joseph McClelland