Investigating Damping Performance of Laser Powder Bed Fused Components With Unique Internal Structures

Abstract

An additive manufacturing (AM) process has been used to fabricate beam components with unique internal geometries capable of reducing weight and inherently suppressing vibration of the structure. Using the laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) AM process, four unique designs are investigated to quantify and understand the damping effectiveness of this manufacturing concept. Forced-response tests are conducted to validate the damping capability of each internal design configuration. The effects of external geometry, thermal distribution associated with internal friction, strain amplitude, and loading rate dependence on damping performance are studied. The results of the studied beams are compared to the damping performance of a fully-fused, or solid baseline LPBF beam. With only 1–4% internal beam volume alteration, the four unique beams are capable of providing up to ten times damping into their respective systems compared to the baseline, solid beam. From the studies of different parameter effects on damping, the main mechanism for vibration suppression is identified. Validation of the vibration suppression physics allows for internal feature optimization via LPBF that can maximize damping effectiveness.

Design of Particle Dampers for Laser Powder Bed Fusion

“…One possibility to increase the damping in laser beam melted structural components is to integrate the effect of particle damping [7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20]. By means of particle dampers, produced by laser powder bed fusion (LPBF), vibrations can be reduced by more than a factor of 20 in some cases [7,10,12].…”

“…In the field of additive manufacturing, especially in powder bed-based processes, the effect of particle damping represents a hitherto little-researched but very effective method for reducing vibrations [7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20]. Particle dampers produced by laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) can reduce vibrations by more than a factor of 20 in a wide frequency range [7,10,12].…”

“…In addition, modelling is challenging due to highly non-linear properties [21][22][23]. Initial approaches to describing the effect of particle damping focus on limited parameter studies on additively manufactured primitives [7,9,10,[12][13][14]16,17]. Isolated demonstrators such as cutting tool holders, braking discs or motorcycle triple clamps have also been considered [8,16,18].…”

Additive Refurbishment of a Vibration-Loaded Structural Component

“…This passive vibration reduction measure is also effective over a wide frequency range from a few Hz to high-frequency applications up to several kHz (Papalou and Masri, 1996;Panossian, 1992;Friend and Kinra, 2000;Fowler et al, 2000;Lu et al, 2017;. Another advantage of a particle damper is that it has little effect on stiffness and mass of a component when properly designed (Scott-Emuakpor et al, 2018;Lu et al, 2017;Xiao et al, 2016).…”

“…For example, vibrations of dynamically loaded structural components can be effectively reduced over a wide frequency range through the effect of particle damping Lu et al, 2017). Furthermore, this effect can be directly integrated into the interior of the component by means of the additive process Laser Powder Bed Fusion (LPBF) (Scott-Emuakpor et al, 2018;. This paper presents a procedure for refurbishing the wheel carrier shown in Figure 1.…”