Microstructure and mechanical properties of Zr-modified aluminum alloy 5083 manufactured by laser powder bed fusion

By Le Zhou, Holden C. Hyer, Sharon Park, Hao Pan, Yuanli Bai, K. Rice, Y. Sohn. Additive Manufacturing, 2019

178 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Aluminum alloy (AA), AA5083 and AA5083 alloyed with 0.7 wt.% Zr (hereafter denoted as AA5083+Zr) were manufactured by laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) using gas atomized powders. Parametric investigation was performed by using laser powers of 200 W and 350 W with various scan speeds. AA5083 alloy was difficult to manufacture by LPBF due to formation of excessive pores or solidification cracking or compositional deviation due to evaporation at all processing parameters examined, i.e., poor buildability/printability. However, with the addition of 0.7 wt.% Zr, the AA5083+Zr alloy was manufactured with near-full density, without solidification cracks and with proper composition. The as-built AA5083+Zr alloy exhibited outstanding tensile properties with yield strength of 212 MPa, tensile strength of 317 MPa and elongation of 22.3%. After heat treatment at 400 °C for 2 h, the yield and tensile strength of LPBF AA5083+Zr alloy increased to 319 MPa and 392 MPa, respectively, although the elongation reduced to 14.1%. Microstructural analyses revealed a dramatic difference in grain size and distribution between the as-built AA5083 and AA5083+Zr alloys. The primary, pro-peritectic Al3Zr particles were observed at the melt pool boundaries, which would refine the grains in the as-built AA5083+Zr alloy, and help eliminate the solidification cracking. Furthermore, a significant amount of nano-scale (˜3 nm) Al3Zr precipitates were observed within the grains after the heat treatment of AA5083+Zr alloy, which would contribute to the increase in strength observed. A qualitative processing map correlating the porosity/cracks and laser power/scan speed is proposed and discussed with respect to the effect of Zr on the refinement of microstructure and improvement of buildability/printability.

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Automotive Engineering, Mechanical Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4e52af098def2ec38b7220fe08792a80009d1d34

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Citations in the corpus

Towards high-temperature applications of aluminium alloys enabled by additive manufacturing (2021, methodology): “In addition to porosity formation, Mg losses of 17– 75% and Zn losses of 58–83% due to vaporisation have been measured [73,93,95,97,98], depending on the suitability of the processing conditions utilised.”
A Novel Strategy to Additively Manufacture 7075 Aluminium Alloy With Selective Laser Melting (2021, background): “Moreover, previous studies [9, 13, 14] have found that the dependence of crack fraction on SLM processing parameters is commonly contrary to the porosity formation.”
Porosity in wire arc additive manufacturing of aluminium alloys (2021, background): “The most important alloying elements are copper, silicon, magnesium, zinc, and manganese [15 , 16].”