Abstract
Selective laser melting (SLM) is a promising additive manufacturing (AM) process for high-strength or high-manufacturing-cost metals such as Ti-6Al-4V widely applied in aeronautical industry components with high material waste or complex geometry. However, one of the main challenges of AM parts is the variability in fatigue properties. In this study, standard cyclic fatigue and monotonic tensile testing specimens were fabricated by SLM and subsequently heat treated using the standard heat treatment (HT) or hot isostatic pressing (HIP) methods. All the specimens were post-treated to relieve the residual stress and subsequently machined to the same surface finishing. These specimens were tested in the low-cycle fatigue (LCF) regime. The effects of post-process methods on the failure mechanisms were observed using scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and optical microscopy (OM) characterization methods. While the tensile test results showed that specimens with different post-process treatment methods have similar tensile strength, the LCF test revealed that no significant difference exists between HT and HIP specimens. Based on the results, critical factors influencing the LCF properties are discussed. Furthermore, a microstructure-based multistage fatigue model was employed to predict the LCF life. The results show good agreement with the experiment.
Highlights
Additive manufacturing (AM) technology can fabricate near-net-shaped parts from the bottom up in a layer-by-layer manner directly from a CAD model without special tooling [1]
It can be observed that the sub-transus temperature treatment decomposed α to α + β, whereby the basket-weave microstructure following heat treatment (HT) consisted of a mixture of α and β phases
It is noted that the low-cycle fatigue (LCF) properties are not easy to distinguish between HT and hot isostatic pressing (HIP) samples
Summary
Additive manufacturing (AM) technology can fabricate near-net-shaped parts from the bottom up in a layer-by-layer manner directly from a CAD model without special tooling [1]. This makes AM technology a potential new manufacturing process for components with complex shapes [2]. Powder bed fusion technology (PBF) is a specific developed subset of AM technologies which uses a concentrated energy beam to melt a powder bed composed of polymer, metal, or ceramic raw materials layer by layer. To produce near fully dense products, the key process parameters include the laser power density, layer thickness, sintering rate, and the manufacturing strategy [10,11], which underlie the mechanism of densification during the manufacturing process [11]
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