The emergence of ferrous-medium entropy alloys (FeMEAs) with excellent tensile properties represents a potential direction for designing alloys based on metastable engineering. In this study, an FeMEA is successfully fabricated using laser powder bed fusion (LPBF), a metal additive manufacturing technology. Tensile tests are conducted on the LPBF-processed FeMEA at room temperature and cryogenic temperatures (77 K). At 77 K, the LPBF-processed FeMEA exhibits high yield strength and excellent ultimate tensile strength through active deformation-induced martensitic transformation. Furthermore, due to the low stability of the face-centered cubic (FCC) phase of the LPBF-processed FeMEA based on nano-scale solute heterogeneity, stress-induced martensitic transformation occurs, accompanied by the appearance of a yield point phenomenon during cryogenic tensile deformation. This study elucidates the origin of the yield point phenomenon and deformation behavior of the FeMEA at 77 K.
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Although the Ti–6Al–4V alloy has been used in the aircraft industry owing to its excellent mechanical properties and low density, the low formability of the alloy hinders broadening its applications. Recently, laser-powder bed fusion (L-PBF) has become a novel process for overcoming the limitations of the alloy (i.e., low formability), owing to the high degree of design freedom for the geometry of products having outstanding performance used in hightech applications. In this study, to investigate the effect of bulk shape on the microstructure and mechanical properties of L-PBFed Ti-6Al-4V alloys, two types of samples are fabricated using L-PBF: thick and thin samples. The thick sample exhibits lower strength and higher ductility than the thin sample owing to the larger grain size and lower residual dislocation density of the thick sample because of the heat input during the L-PBF process.
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Because magnets fabricated using Nd-Fe-B exhibit excellent magnetic properties, this novel material is used in various high-tech industries. However, because of the brittleness and low formability of Nd-Fe-B magnets, the design freedom of shapes for improving the performance is limited based on conventional tooling and postprocessing. Laserpowder bed fusion (L-PBF), the most famous additive manufacturing (AM) technique, has recently emerged as a novel process for producing geometrically complex shapes of Nd-Fe-B parts owing to its high precision and good spatial resolution. However, because of the repeated thermal shock applied to the materials during L-PBF, it is difficult to fabricate a dense Nd-Fe-B magnet. In this study, a high-density (>96%) Nd-Fe-B magnet is successfully fabricated by minimizing the thermal residual stress caused by substrate heating during L-PBF.
Metal three-dimensional (3D) printing is an important emerging processing method in powder metallurgy. There are many successful applications of additive manufacturing. However, processing parameters such as laser power and scan speed must be manually optimized despite the development of artificial intelligence. Automatic calibration using information in an additive manufacturing database is desirable. In this study, 15 commercial pure titanium samples are processed under different conditions, and the 3D pore structures are characterized by X-ray tomography. These samples are easily classified into three categories, unmelted, well melted, or overmelted, depending on the laser energy density. Using more than 10,000 projected images for each category, convolutional neural networks are applied, and almost perfect classification of these samples is obtained. This result demonstrates that machine learning methods based on X-ray tomography can be helpful to automatically identify more suitable processing parameters.
The convergence of artificial intelligence with smart factories or smart mechanical systems has been actively studied to maximize the efficiency and safety. Despite the high improvement of artificial neural networks, their application in the manufacturing industry has been difficult due to limitations in obtaining meaningful data from factories or mechanical systems. Accordingly, there have been active studies on manufacturing components with sensor integration allowing them to generate important data from themselves. Additive manufacturing enables the fabrication of a net shaped product with various materials including plastic, metal, or ceramic parts. With the principle of layer-bylayer adhesion of material, there has been active research to utilize this multi-step manufacturing process, such as changing the material at a certain step of adhesion or adding sensor components in the middle of the additive manufacturing process. Particularly for smart parts manufacturing, researchers have attempted to embed sensors or integrated circuit boards within a three-dimensional component during the additive manufacturing process. While most of the sensor embedding additive manufacturing was based on polymer material, there have also been studies on sensor integration within metal or ceramic materials. This study reviews the additive manufacturing technology for sensor integration into plastic, ceramic, and metal materials.
A cold-work tool steel powder is used to fabricate 3-dimensional objects by selective laser melting using a high-pressure gas atomization process. The spherical powder particles form continuous carbide networks among the austenite matrix and its decomposition products. The carbides comprise Nb-rich MC and Mo-rich M2C. In the SLM process, the process parameters such as the laser power (90 W), layer thickness (25 μm), and hatch spacing (80 μm) are kept fixed, while the scan speed is changed from 50 mm/s to 4000 mm/s. At a low scan speed of 50 mm/s, spherical cavities develop due to over melting, while they are substantially reduced on increasing the speed to 2000 mm/s. The carbide network spacing decreases with increasing speed. At an excessively high speed of 4000 mm/s, long and irregularly shaped cavities are developed due to incomplete melting. The influence of the scan pattern is examined, for which 1 × 1 mm2 blocks constituting a processing layer are irradiated in a random sequence. This island-type pattern exhibits the same effect as that of a low scan speed. Post processing of an object using hot isostatic pressing leads to a great reduction in the porosity but causes coarsening of the microstructure.
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In this study, H13 tool steel sculptures are built by a metal 3D printing process at various laser scan speeds. The properties of commercial H13 tool steel powders are confirmed for the metal 3D printing process used: powder bed fusion (PBF), which is a selective laser melting (SLM) process. Commercial H13 powder has an excellent flowability of 16.68 s/50 g with a Hausner ratio of 1.25 and a density of 7.68 g/cm3. The sculptures are built with dimensions of 10 × 10 × 10 mm3 in size using commercial H13 tool steel powder. The density measured by the Archimedes method is 7.64 g/cm3, similar to the powder density of 7.68 g/cm3. The hardness is measured by Rockwell hardness equipment 5 times to obtain a mean value of 54.28 HRC. The optimum process conditions in order to build the sculptures are a laser power of 90 W, a layer thickness of 25 μm, an overlap of 30%, and a laser scan speed of 200 mm/s.
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Selective laser melting (SLM) can produce a layer of a metal powder and then fabricate a three-dimensional structure by a layer-by-layer method. Each layer consists of several lines of molten metal. Laser parameters and thermal properties of the materials affect the geometric characteristics of the melt pool such as its height, depth, and width. The geometrical characteristics of the melt pool are determined herein by optical microscopy and three-dimensional bulk structures are fabricated to investigate the relationship between them. Powders of the commercially available Fe-based tool steel AISI H13 and Ni-based superalloy Inconel 738LC are used to investigate the effect of material properties. Only the scan speed is controlled to change the laser parameters. The laser power and hatch space are maintained throughout the study. Laser of a higher energy density is seen to melt a wider and deeper range of powder and substrate; however, it does not correspond with the most highly densified three-dimensional structure. H13 shows the highest density at a laser scan speed of 200 mm/s whereas Inconel 738LC shows the highest density at 600 mm/s.
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