Inoculation treatment of an additively manufactured 2024 aluminium alloy with titanium nanoparticles

By Qiyang Tan, Jingqi Zhang, Qiang Sun, Zhiqi Fan, Gan Li, Yu Yin, Yingang Liu, Mingxing Zhang. Acta Materialia, 2020

419 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Considerable studies on metal selective laser melting (SLM) have proved the necessity to refine microstructure parts fabricated by SLM in order to eliminate property anisotropy, hot-tearing and to increase the SLM-processability. In the present work, Ti nanoparticles, at the first time, were discovered to be an extremely effective inoculant for an SLMed 2024 aluminium alloy. 0.7 wt% addition of Ti nanoparticles was capable of substantially eliminating the hot-tearing cracks and columnar structure, and refining the grains in the SLMed 2024 alloy in a broad processing window. The substantial grain refinement in the Ti-inoculated 2024 alloy was attributed to the in-situ formation of Al3Ti nanoparticles with a L12 ordered structure, which formed a coherent interface with Al matrix and therefore significantly promoted the heterogeneous nucleation of the α-Al during solidification of melt pools in the SLM process. After a conventional T6 heat treatment, this SLMed alloy exhibited a superior balance of strength and ductility (tensile strength was up to 432 ± 20 MPa and elongation of 10 ± 0.8%), which was comparable to its wrought counterpart. This work can be considered as a breakthrough in research of fabricating high-strength aluminium alloys using SLM.

Subfields: Automotive Engineering, Mechanical Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3cdf8a6bc89e4f0972442a225a34cc3fe9cc504a

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Automotive Engineering

1. Han Huang

In Mechanical Engineering

1. P. Howes
2. Han Huang
3. G. Gibbons
4. A. Das
5. Mingxing Zhang
6. H. Kotadia
7. P. Kelly

Citations in the corpus

• A review of Laser Powder Bed Fusion Additive Manufacturing of aluminium alloys: Microstructure and properties (2021, methodology): “[79] used Ti nanoparticles in 2024 alloy feedstock powder, which allowed the development of metastable L12-Al3Ti.”
• A Novel Strategy to Additively Manufacture 7075 Aluminium Alloy With Selective Laser Melting (2021, methodology): “In addition, Ti inoculation might also introduce Ti solute into the melt, further contributing to the grain refinement [15, 16].”