Scalability of the mechanical properties of selective laser melting produced micro-struts

Abstract

Selective laser melting (SLM) is a manufacturing process that builds up metallic or ceramic parts layer by layer directly from 3D-computer-aided design data, offering, for example, the advantage of imposing little restrictions in terms of geometric complexity. One of the main challenges of the SLM process is to improve its efficiency by increasing the build rate of the process and thereby decreasing time and cost. One way of achieving this is increasing the applied laser power and beam diameter, thereby melting more volume in a shorter period of time. Another option of improving efficiency is reducing the volume of the material which has to be melted, made possible by the aforementioned limitless geometric freedom offered by the SLM process. Hereby, one can generate hollow parts for better exploitation and adaption of the volume to specific load cases. Large volumes can be replaced by lattice structures with a certain volume fraction, saving weight and production time by maintaining the stiffness of the structure. To ensure the mechanical properties of the new light-weight structures are comparable to the properties of conventional solid base material, several different lattice structures have already been investigated, all consisting of countless little struts. Therefore, here various formats of single-and multistruts have been built to investigate the scalability of the produced material's mechanical properties. This paper presents the results, which will be used for better prediction of mechanical properties of SLM manufactured lattice structures

Manufacturing of Ti–6Al–4V Micro‐Implantable Parts Using Hybrid Selective Laser Melting and Micro‐Electrical Discharge Machining

“…Hagemann et al [19] produced micro actuators from NiTi shape memory alloy which could be used for cochlear implants. In addition, Bultmann et al [20] utilized the geometric freedom offered by the SLM process to produce hollow micro-struts. 316L stainless steel micro-struts with a diameter ranged from 300-740 µm and of length of 3.5 mm were successfully fabricated.…”

Mechanical and morphological properties of additively manufactured SS316L and Ti6Al4V micro-struts as a function of build angle

“…The layer-wise fabrication of PBF also has an impact on the mechanical properties and morphology of single micro-struts when built vertically versus at a low angle to the build platform [16] , [17] , [18] , [19] , [25] , [26] , [27] , [28] , [29] , [30] , [31] , [32] , [33] , [34] , [35] . Strut build angle affects the cross section [16] , [17] , [18] , [25] , [32] , ‘waviness’ or eccentricity [27] , [32] , [34] and roughness [28] , [29] , [35] of the strut.…”

The Influence of Exposure Energy Density on Porosity and Microhardness of the SLM Additive Manufactured Elements

“…The possibilities to modify the manufacturing process in the SLM technique has created the possibility to conduct scientific research at many scientific and industry facilities [10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19]. One of the most common topics is the analysis of the process parameters which influence on the mechanical properties of manufactured elements [20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30]. In this paper, the influence of manufacturing process parameters on the porosity and microhardness of the additive manufactured elements was determined.…”