The issue of trapped powder within a part made using powder bed fusion additive manufacturing (AM) is one of the 'dirty secrets' of AM, yet it has not received significant attention by the research community. Trapped powders limit the application of AM for complex geometries, including heat exchangers and dies with conformal cooling channels. Being able to detect and remove trapped powder from the build is a necessary step to avoid downstream processing and performance challenges. In this work, 'powder challenge geometries' with complex internal features were fabricated via laser powder bed fusion (L-PBF) and electron beam selective melting (EBSM) and were used to assess the effectiveness of several powder removal and inspection methods. Hand-held ultrasonic polishing was explored as a powder removal technique and was shown to effectively clear extremely elongated channels that grit-blasting (the current industry standard) cannot clear. X-ray computed tomography (XCT) and weighing were used to inspect and quantitatively assess the effectiveness of powder removal techniques on the challenge geometries. Using the lesser known 'vacuum boiling' powder removal process and the more common ultrasonic bathing process, trapped L-PBF powder was easily removed from the deep channels. Conversely, trapped EBSM powder was difficult to remove using ultrasonic polishing as the powder was sintered inside the channels. It was shown that the powder recovered by the ultrasonic polishing process had size distributions, surface chemistry, morphology and porosity similar to the virgin powder. It is suggested, on these bases, that the recovered powder could likely be recycled without detrimental effects on the process operation.
An assessment of the effect of topology optimization design parameters on the performance of an additively manufactured part has been performed. The dependence of the output from a topology optimization involving an aerospace component on the topology optimization control parameters, evolution rate and filter radius was determined. The converged strain energy was found to depend quadratically on the filter radius while the number of iterations required to achieve a solution was broadly related to the evolution rate. These findings demonstrate the potential for significant design efficiencies when manufacturing using additive manufacturing approaches but also the need to be aware of the sensitivity of the bidirectional evolutionary structural optimization optimized design on the selected optimization parameters. This sensitivity can potentially be used advantageously to steer the solution to an optima with features suitable to a particular manufacturing method such as additive manufacturing.
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