Digital forming of glass by controlling loading and laser heating

There are several techniques for 3D printing glass by sequentially fusing molten tracks. We investigate a process feeding cool glass filament into a CO2 laser to provide local heating. Unlike most crystalline materials, glasses retain significant viscosity when molten. In filament-fed laser heated processing the feed exerts a significant stress on the laser heated region which strongly influences on final track geometry. This introduces challenges but also allows the creation of fully dense glass volumes and free-standing structures. The stress field on the molten region is controlled by using pneumatics and orienting the feed in the moving deposition coordinate system.