Additive manufacturing with wire – Comparison of processes

Abstract

Additive manufacturing (AM) processes involving the use of an electric arc, laser or electron beams and a deposited material in the form of a wire are efficient methods enabling the making of elements having complicated shapes and which are made of expensive technical alloys, e.g. stainless steels, nickel or titanium alloys. The demand for fast prototyping results from the development of new technologies in the automotive, aviation and machine-building industries. Generally speaking, AM offers numerous advantages. At the core of these are reduced production and material costs, reduced development and lead times, and improved performance. However, not all of the current AM processes are equally suited to provide all of these advantages. Compared to the powder and wire systems some aspects can be underlined. During the powder deposition process a certain amount of powders cannot be caught by the melt pool. The powders are blown to the surrounding environment, which causes potential hazard to the operators and environment. Compare to powder feeding, wire feeding method has higher material usage efficiency. Almost all the materials fed into the melt pool during the process are used to form the deposit. In the paper the advantages of AM methods are presented. The main focus of the work was to presented the results of AM process with wire of stainless steel. The evaluation of the microstructure and the mechanical properties of AM parts, manufactured by arc, laser beam and electron beam processes, are presented. The analysis revealed that the properties of the deposited parts are not worse than that properties guaranteed by producer of filler material. Thus the fast AM technologies involving the use of a wire and an arc or a laser and an electron beams as the source of energy should gain recognition among entrepreneurs intended to implement innovative solutions in their companies.