Tungsten Tungsten Tungsten, or wolfram, is a chemical element with symbol W and atomic number 74. The name "tungsten" comes from the former Swedish name for the tungstate mineral "scheelite", "tung sten" or "heavy stone". Tungsten is a rare metal found naturally on Earth almost exclusively combined with other elements in chemical compounds rather than alone. It was identified as a new element in 1781 and first isolated as a metal in 1783. Its important ores include wolframite and scheelite. The free element is remarkable for its robustness, especially the fact that it has the highest melting point of all the
Selective laser melting Selective laser melting Selective laser melting (SLM), also known as direct metal laser sintering (DMLS) or laser powder bed fusion (LPBF), is a rapid prototyping, 3D printing, or additive manufacturing (AM) technique designed to use a high power-density laser to melt and fuse metallic powders together. In many SLM is considered to be a subcategory of selective laser sintering (SLS). The SLM process has the ability to fully melt the metal material into a solid three-dimensional part unlike SLS. Selective laser melting, one of the several 3D printing technologies, started in 1995 at the Fraunhofer Institute ILT in Aachen, Germany,