Rajesh Rangappa

Additive manufacturing technology
is one of the rapidly growing areas of research
and development since it has tremendous
potential to replace some of the existing
conventional manufacturing processes.
Additive manufacturing is a way of
manufacturing parts of building layer-bylayer
thus fabricating three-dimensional
physical models directly from a computeraided
design (CAD) model. The Additive
manufacturing method can produce fully
dense metal parts in a short time, with higher
precision. Selective Laser Sintering (SLS)
technique uses powder bed fusion, in which
each powder bed layer is selectively fused by
using a laser or electron beam, as an energy
source. It is the most promising additive
manufacturing technology that can be used
for manufacturing smaller and medium
volume, simpler or complex metal parts. This
review presents evolution, current status and
challenges of the SLS Technique. The article
presented emphasises on metal material
processed by SLS technique. It also talks
about the SLS Technique in terms of
advantages/disadvantages, materials,
machines and applications.