Abstract
Improving the surface roughness quality of 3D printed components, especially metallic ones, which are fabricated from the selective laser melting (SLM) method, has drawn enormous attention from the research community. It should be noted that various studies on this topic have reported that precise surface roughness results can be obtained with various techniques that are indeed not cost-effective. Differing itself from these studies, this manuscript investigates an economical solution for fabricating and surface treating SLM components. Specifically, the inspected specimens were printed with recycled 316L stainless steel powder and treated solely with two abrasive surface finishing methods. In the manuscript, two scanning strategies namely meander and stripes, and three types of surfaces were investigated. Subsequently, their 2D and 3D surface roughness results were elaborated. After the proposed herein abrasive treatment, 3D surface roughness arithmetical mean height of a surface (Sa) value of 0.9 µm can be achieved.
Highlights
Without undergoing any post surface finishing, the selective laser melting (SLM) parts cannot satisfy the requirements of Ra being below 0.8 μm as for machine components and below 1 μm as for dental implants [19]
The two fabricating processes have been combined into a so-called hybrid additivesubtractive manufacturing (HASM) process, where adding and subtracting material from a fabricated component are realized simultaneously in one machine [21,22]
To assess the “staircase” effect caused by the angled geometry, which is critical to the surface roughness of 3D printed specimens, [19], the inverted truncated pyramid feature was introduced at the bottom of the design
Summary
Without undergoing any post surface finishing, the SLM parts cannot satisfy the requirements of Ra being below 0.8 μm as for machine components and below 1 μm as for dental implants [19]. To achieve the desired surface roughness, as previously mentioned, SLM parts must undergo the traditional computer numerical control (CNC) machining process [20]. The two fabricating processes have been combined into a so-called hybrid additivesubtractive manufacturing (HASM) process, where adding and subtracting material from a fabricated component are realized simultaneously in one machine [21,22]. Due to the restriction of the tool path when finish machining a 3D printed part, several alternative. Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations
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