Laser polishing of selective laser melted components
By Sundar Marimuthu, Andrew Triantaphyllou, M. Antar, D. Wimpenny, H. Morton, M. Beard. 2015
251 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The shape complexities of aerospace components are continuously increasing, which encourages industries to refine their manufacturing processes. Among such processes, the selective laser melting (SLM) process is becoming an economical and energy efficient alternative to conventional manufacturing processes. However, dependant on the component shape, the high surface roughness observed with SLM parts can affect the surface integrity and geometric tolerances of the manufactured components. To account for this, laser polishing of SLM components is emerging as a viable process to achieve high-quality surfaces. This report details an investigation carried out to understand the basic fundamentals of continuous wave laser polishing of SLM samples. A numerical model, based on a computational fluid dynamic formulation, was used to assist the understanding of melt pool dynamics, which significantly controls the final surface roughness. The investigation identified the input thermal energy as the key parameter that significantly affect the melt pool convection, and essentially controls the surface quality. Minimum meltpool velocity is essential to achieve wider laser polished track width with good surface finish. Experimental results showed a reduction of surface roughness from 10.2 μm to 2.4 μm after laser polishing with optimised parameters. Strategies to control the surface topology during laser polishing of SLM components are discussed.
Subfields: Computational Mechanics, Mechanical Engineering, Mechanics of Materials
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c15bcc1e51c71b95e455152be1f7953ff3bbed5a
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In Computational Mechanics
In Mechanical Engineering
In Mechanics of Materials
Citations in the corpus
- A review on the state-of-the-art of surface finishing processes and related ISO/ASTM standards for metal additive manufactured components (2020, background): “Yes (Ma, Guan, and Zhou 2017; Marimuthu et al. 2015) Ni-based Alloy (e.g. F3055, F3056, etc) Yes (Mohammadian, Turenne, and Brailovski 2018) Yes (Guo et al. 2019) N.A.”
- Surface modification of additive manufactured components by ultrasonic cavitation abrasive finishing (2017, background): “Recently, laser polishing emerged as a potential cost-effective surface finishing solution for SLM surfaces [5]; as the same PBF laser source could be used for in-process polishing [6].”
- Laser polishing of 3D printed mesoscale components (2017, background): “[41] developed a computational fluid dynamic s (CFD) based numerical model to understand the melt pool dynamics during LP with laser energy, beam scanning speed and focal offset distance as the variable parameters and its associated influence on resulting surface roughness.”
- Development of Micro Selective Laser Melting: The State of the Art and Future Perspectives (2019, background): “Laser polishing or laser re-melting has emerged as a potential cost-effective surface-finishing process for SLM surfaces that can use the same laser source as AM [115,121,129].”