In the last years, the demand of products fabricated by rapid prototyping techniques has grown sharply for many different uses, such as the fabrication of scale models and functional pieces with special characteristics for the industrial sector or the production of implants in the biomedical sector. This fact is joined to the research effort which is being carried out to obtain micro-scale products like biomedical sensors, a huge amount of MEMS devices or even 3D batteries in order to overcome some of the limits of the current macro-devices.
In the majority of the cases, thin film techniques like sputtering or LCVD as well as techniques based on 3D printing are being used to obtain the micro-scale devices, with the limitations inherent to these techniques like the need of vacuum systems, the processing speed or the restrictions in the types of materials. In that sense, some of these limitations could be overcome adopting a raping prototyping technique based on laser cladding. In this work we propose the rapid prototyping of functional parts based on laser micro-cladding, which can be considered as a downscaling of conventional laser cladding, due to its higher processing rate and its ability to work with a wide range of materials. On the other hand, another main feature of this one step additive technique is the low thermal loads applied to the substrate, which is an important parameter in applications where the laser interaction zone is close to sensitive elements.
An experimental set-up based on the use of a single mode fiber laser and a lateral powder injection system adequate to supply micron and submicron particles was used to produce metallic 3D structures in the micrometer range. The influence of several processing parameters on the geometry and mechanical properties of the tridimensional structures were systematically studied.