Abstract
This contribution is focused on the influence of build orientation on hardness of materials sintered using direct metal laser sintering (DMLS) technology. It builds on the current research works that has monitored the influence of build orientation on a fatigue life, mechanical properties, roughness after machining, etc. In the mentioned work, a slight influence of build orientation on the above properties was shown. The hardness was measured on a Ti6Al4V alloy which was made of powder by DMLS technology. The individual materials were sintered at different laser powers, then annealed to remove internal stresses. Part of the experiment examined the metallographic analysis of materials in the direction perpendicular to the sintered layers and parallel with the sintered layers. Microhardness was measured on metallographic cross-sections and the results were statistically processed. The influence of laser power on a respective material hardness was assessed by one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA), a comparison of the hardness between sintered and sintered-annealed samples, as well as the comparison of hardness in the two considered directions was performed by t-test and F-test. A statistically significant difference in the hardness of the materials prepared at different laser powers was found. The influence of heat treatment, as well as the direction of material building also showed a statistically significant difference.
Highlights
Expanding additive manufacturing (AM) methods have brought significant progress to the emerging industry over the last decade
Ti6Al4V of grade 5 α-β alloy powder was used for sintering the test samples
The two-phase microstructure typically consists of many lamellar colonies composed of varying needle layers and thin layers of β phase which cause good mechanical properties, such as high strength and good ductility
Summary
Expanding additive manufacturing (AM) methods have brought significant progress to the emerging industry over the last decade. They allow the production of metal parts of a complicated shape directly from a computer model, without time-consuming machining, assembly, or preparing expensive casting molds. The 3D printing process produces high strength, yet delicate, components that are used in many industries, including aerospace, automotive, electronics, packaging, and medicine. In the area of biomedical engineering—implant production, replacement of various missing parts of the skeleton, etc.—the proven biocompatible Ti6Al4V alloy is widely implemented. Since each substitute possesses the unique shape and the number of pieces produced is in most cases only one, from an economic point of view classical production technologies are unusable.
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