I NEED TO DECIDE A NYLON BASED MATERIAL FOR SELECTIVE LASER SINTERING PROCESS
Most of the commercial SLS machines work with nylon powder and the material is usually supplied by the manufacturer. For general purpose, it is still possible to get some powder and is usually sold as nylon powder for SLS or for 3d printing. Nylon is a generic term for a relatively wide family of polymers, but the variety Black PA12 seems to be easier to work with.
Dear Deepak,
There are two major companies selling laser sinter machines for building plastic parts: EOS (Germany) and 3D Systems (USA). They also provide the fine powder for their machines. Of course there are other companies producing and selling only the fine powder such as ExelTec (France).
All three use (white/ natural) polyamide 12 as the standard material. There are some varieties, specifically in using filler materials like glas bids, aluminum particals etc. for diversifying mechanical or thermal part properties, but the base material is PA12.
EOS also provides polyamide 11, polystyrene and PEEK for the usage in their specific machines.
There are some efforts using PA6.x for in LS-processes but as far as i know, yet there is no stable process established.
However, i wouldn´t advise using black PA12 because it contaminates your machine with black µ-particles, which are (by any means) not easy to clean up afterwards.
Be aware that all three companies only sell amounts of 100 kg minimum per purchase which is quite expensive for testing.
If you allready purchased a machine, use the fine powder recommended by the machine manufacturer. They developed the machine, the powder, the process parameters and stability for best results.
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