Grain structure control during metal 3D printing by high-intensity ultrasound
By C. J. Todaro, M. Easton, D. Qiu, Duyao Zhang, M. Bermingham, E. Lui, Milan Brandt, D. StJohn, M. Qian. Nature Communications, 2020
688 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Additive manufacturing (AM) of metals, also known as metal 3D printing, typically leads to the formation of columnar grain structures along the build direction in most as-built metals and alloys. These long columnar grains can cause property anisotropy, which is usually detrimental to component qualification or targeted applications. Here, without changing alloy chemistry, we demonstrate an AM solidification-control solution to printing metallic alloys with an equiaxed grain structure and improved mechanical properties. Using the titanium alloy Ti-6Al-4V as a model alloy, we employ high-intensity ultrasound to achieve full transition from columnar grains to fine (~100 µm) equiaxed grains in AM Ti-6Al-4V samples by laser powder deposition. This results in a 12% improvement in both the yield stress and tensile strength compared with the conventional AM columnar Ti-6Al-4V. We further demonstrate the generality of our technique by achieving similar grain structure control results in the nickel-based superalloy Inconel 625, and expect that this method may be applicable to other metallic materials that exhibit columnar grain structures during AM. 3D printing of metals produces elongated columnar grains which are usually detrimental to component performance. Here, the authors combine ultrasound and 3D printing to promote equiaxed and refined microstructures in a titanium alloy and a nickel-based superalloy resulting in improved mechanical properties.
Subfields: Automotive Engineering, Mechanical Engineering
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3f0981a11441dcdb3fb888e6843f1d6dd1a2154a
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Citations in the corpus
- A review of Laser Powder Bed Fusion Additive Manufacturing of aluminium alloys: Microstructure and properties (2021, background): “[189] studied a vibrating build plate (20 kHz, 30 μm amplitude), and clearly demonstrated that columnar grains are replaced with fine equiaxed grains.”
- Material-structure-performance integrated laser-metal additive manufacturing (2021, background): “, high-intensity ultrasound (128) and strong magnetic field (129)] during AM also yields fully equiaxed grains and improved mechanical properties without changingmaterial composition.”
- Wire Arc Additive Manufacturing of Stainless Steels: A Review (2020, positive): “…processes include PBF-L (powder bed fusion utilizing a laser as the heat source) [16–25], DED-GMA (directed energy deposition with gas metal arc), and DED-L (directed energy deposition using laser beam as the heat source) [26,27]. feedstock material is in the form of powder, wire, or sheet [1,10].”
- A review on the state-of-the-art of surface finishing processes and related ISO/ASTM standards for metal additive manufactured components (2020, background): “…future research focus resides in the standardisation of AM, geometry optimisation (du Plessis et al. 2019), mechanical property enhancement, microstructure control (Todaro et al. 2020; Tan, Sing, and Yeong 2020), and defect elimination through online monitoring (Malekipour and El-Mounayri 2017).”
- Recent innovations in laser additive manufacturing of titanium alloys (2024, background): “For the ultrasonic vibration-assisted LDED of Ti-6Al-4V alloy, the prior-β grains can be refined significantly, as shown in figures 15(a)–(d) [141].”