Laser fabrication

Christian Fauteux    Laser fabrication     carbon fibers, freeform fabrication, LCVD, microbending, nanoindentation, raman spectroscopy

Introduction

Freeform fabrication is a type of manufacturing process that allows the fabrication of 3D objects with a large variety of shapes, structure and composition. Laser-assisted chemical vapor deposition (LCVD) is a freeform fabrication technique that allows the deposition of micro-scale structures at a high growth rate with the flexibility of conventional CVD.

The LCVD process

During chemical vapour deposition (CVD), energy is given to a gas (the precursor gas) which contains the atom that we want to deposit. This energy dissociated the gaseous molecules by a series of chemical reactions in order to obtain a solid product (the deposit) on a surface where we want the deposition to occur (the substrate). This can be conceptualized by the following equation which describes the deposition of the gaseous species AB_u :
AB_u →  A(↓) + u B(↑)

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