First, Do Not Degrade - an Alternative View on Polymer Laser Sintering

In the work, for the first time, the method of Dual Beam Laser Sintering of polymers (DBLS) was presented, in which, instead of heating the entire volume of the polymer throughout the entire process, a second, additional laser was used for selective in terms of volume and time heating of the material. The principle of operation and the design of the prototype are presented. Using the developed station, an experiment was carried out for sintering samples from technical polylactide powder as a function of selected process parameters. It confirmed the functionality of the method and proved that the sintering process can be controlled in a fairly wide range for the proposed method. A preliminary comparison of changes in the physicochemical properties of the obtained samples in relation to the samples sintered by standard laser sintering was carried out using Gel Permeation Chromatography, Fourier Transform Infrared Reflectance and Differential Scanning Calorimetry. The experiment showed that the presented method has the potential to limit the thermal degradation of sensitive polymer materials.