Exploring Potentialities of Direct Laser Deposition: Thin-Walled Structures

Abstract

In the context of Industry 4.0, the interest towards the additive manufacturing processes is growing due to their numerous advantages, such as the possibility to prototype, the reduction of waste material, the inferior time to market, ad so on. In particular, a promising technology is the Direct Laser Deposition, which uses a focused laser beam to melt powders as there are deposited. In opposition to the well-established powder-bed fusion technologies, there are still some issues related to this process. This work aims to solve one of them, exploring the potentialities of DLD in printing thin-wall structures. For this purpose, the influence of the adopted deposition strategy and of the layer thickness on the geometrical accuracy and mechanical properties has been investigated. The results have pointed out that the first variable strongly influences the workpiece. It is possible to deposit thin-wall structures with a ZigZag strategy and consider a layer thickness equal to 90% of the height of the single track, printed with the same process parameters.