Conventional direct energy deposition requires the wire or nozzle to be close to the build platform which in real life situations, especially in repair work, can be a limitation. Therefore, one useful tool would be a method of drop deposition from a distance, where a metal wire is being fed into a laser to produce drops that are sent into hard-to-reach areas. This creates a need to study the precision of this method.


This study includes a state-of-the-art review of the process and aims to find the boundaries for drop deposition and develop it further to perform high precision placements from larger distances.


This is done by filming the process with high-speed cameras during varying conditions and making distance measurements of the spread in these long-range depositions.


For each choice of parameters there seem to be an optimum window of laser power levels. Outside this window of laser powers, on the low side, there is too much incomplete melting of the wire which disturbs the formation and detachment of the droplets. These drops often also fail to fuse with the substate. Outside the window on the high side there are forced detachments and scattering of drops because of bursts of laser-induced vapor pressure during the process of melting the wire.


Within this window, the disturbance of the growing droplet from both incompletely melted wire, as well as the laser itself is lower and the precision is higher.