Optimizing Selective Laser Melting for Reflective Optics

The need for individually designed optical components, e.g. reflectors, regarding specific light distributions increased rapidly throughout many industries over the past years. In order to build reflectors that maintain the properties for such light distributions, additive manufacturing gains constantly more importance due to its vast number of design possibilities. However, the surface of an additively manufactured reflector offers insufficient physical properties. In this work the influence of parameter settings on surface quality is investigated for a Selective Laser Melting process. Therefore a reflector model is printed with different parameter settings to evaluate surface roughness, reflectivity and similar values. In addition the effects of post process procedures are investigated. The process settings are evaluated regarding their impact on the surface quality. Furthermore parameters are consolidated in order to reduce the number of process variables. Finding optimal parameter settings enables future work on implementing design guidelines for reflectors, adding integrated functions and accessing process chains to manufacture simple lighting systems.