Open Access

Simon Girnth, Christian Wacker, Nils Waldt, Günter Klawitter, Klaus Dröder

• Additive manufacturing processes based on powder bed fusion offer a high degree of design flexibility and enable the processing of a wide range of materials, including metals, ceramics, and polymers, while maintaining minimal porosity. However, production of multi-material components with locally tailored properties to meet specific requirements by incorporating different materials with a high degree of spatial selectivity remains an elusive challenge. Essential prerequisites for achieving this selectivity are specialized selective powder deposition techniques, their development, characterization, and subsequent implementation. In order to investigate optimization potentials and to identify research gaps in the field of selective powder deposition techniques, an evaluation of the current literature is performed in this study, ultimately highlighting promising potentials for vibration-assisted approaches. Key considerations include the reduction of implementation complexity and the downscaling of associated devices to increase their applicability. To achieve implementation simplification, this study derives dimensionless quantities that facilitate a targeted calculation of control parameters by associating powder layer quality metrics with relevant input quantities. The validity of the derived dimensionless quantities is verified by discrete-element method simulations and physical experiments employing a novel miniaturized vibration-assisted device. Metal, ceramic and polymer powders are used as representative samples to demonstrate the versatility of the method for different classes of materials. Ultimately, the presented methods enable a significant improvement in the applicability of vibration-assisted devices and represent an integrative component that provides a suitable basis for further research efforts in the field of combined processing of multiple materials by additive manufacturing technologies that utilize powder beds.