Review of Powder Bed Fusion Additive Manufacturing for Metals

Abstract

Additive manufacturing (AM) as a disruptive technology has received much attention in recent years. In practice, however, much effort is focused on the AM of polymers. It is comparatively more expensive and more challenging to additively manufacture metallic parts due to their high temperature, the cost of producing powders, and capital outlays for metal additive manufacturing equipment. The main technology currently used by numerous companies in the aerospace and biomedical sectors to fabricate metallic parts is powder bed technology, in which either electron or laser beams are used to melt and fuse the powder particles line by line to make a three-dimensional part. Since this technology is new and also sought by manufacturers, many scientific questions have arisen that need to be answered. This manuscript gives an introduction to the technology and common materials and applications. Furthermore, the microstructure and quality of parts made using powder bed technology for several materials that are commonly fabricated using this technology are reviewed and the effects of several process parameters investigated in the literature are examined. New advances in fabricating highly conductive metals such as copper and aluminum are discussed and potential for future improvements is explored.

PBF-EB of Fe-Cr-V Alloy for Wear Applications

“…The gas atomized powders were obtained from m4p material solutions GmbH, Germany with a powder fraction of 50-150 µm. Corresponding flowability of 16 s/50 g and a tapped density of 4.8 g/cm 3 were sufficient for the printing of parts with at least 99.8% of the theoretical density. A detailed powder analysis is reported in a previous publication [25].…”

“…Thus, the density would jump to the material density of about 7.4 g/cm 3 . For the purpose of completeness, the density of the FeCr-10V solid material was also measured using a gas pycnometer and resulted in 7.2499 g/cm 3 which was a relative density of 98.7% as compared with the theoretical density. This supports the hypothesis of closed porosity of the thin-walled samples, from Figure 13.…”

“…Additive manufacturing (AM), especially powder bed fusion (PBF) technologies, such as laser beam powder bed fusion (PBF-LB) and electron beam powder bed fusion (PBF-EB), have been proven suitable for the production of complex-shaped parts. However, most of the materials that have been investigated were non-iron based, as their manufacturing was often combined with high production and material costs, or stainless or maraging steel [ 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 ]. Interest in the use of AM for cost-driven industries, tool steel applications in particular, has been increasing recently, which is reflected in the number of publications in the last years [ 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 , 19 , 20 , 21 , 22 , 23 , 24 , 25 ].…”

Investigation of Spatter Trajectories in an SLM Build Chamber under Argon Gas Flow

“…Additive manufacturing techniques are gaining prominence as the solution of choice for manufacturing complex and intricate geometric structures for a multitude of applications. Among the various metal additive manufacturing techniques, selective laser melting (SLM) is gaining traction in various domains from the aerospace to the medical sector due to its accuracy and feature resolution in addition to its ability to produce both porous and fully dense shapes [1,2]. The SLM manufacturing process involves locally melting a thin sheet of micro-sized metal powder using a high-power laser beam and building the cross-section of the desired geometry one layer at a time.…”

Analysis of Ti6Al4V Alloy Prototype Fabricated via Selective Laser Melting

“…It is basically the transformation from "design for manufacturing to manufacturing for design". Powder bed fusion methods require the help of a high-intensity beam to melt and fuse material powder together [1][2][3][4]. Some of the commonly used printing technologies include selective laser sintering (SLS), selective laser melting (SLM), and electron beam melting.…”