Improving the fatigue behaviour of a selectively laser melted aluminium alloy: Influence of heat treatment and surface quality

By N. Aboulkhair, I. Maskery, Christopher John Tuck, Ian Ashcroft, N. Everitt. 2016

314 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Selective laser melting (SLM) is being widely utilised to fabricate intricate structures used in various industries. Widening the range of applications that can benefit from such promising technology requires validating SLM parts in load bearing applications. Recent studies have mainly focussed on static loading, with minor attention to cyclic loading despite its vital importance in many applications. In this work, the fatigue performance of SLM AlSi10Mg was investigated considering the effects of surface quality and heat treatment. Compared to heat treatment, machining the samples played a minor role in improving the fatigue behaviour. This is potentially attractive to industries interested in latticed structures and topology-optimised parts where post-processing machining is not feasible. The characteristically fine microstructure in the as-built samples provided good fatigue crack propagation resistance but none of them survived nominal fatigue life of 3 × 107 cycles within the maximum stress range of 63–220 MPa. A specially-tailored heat treatment increased the material's ductility, significantly improving its fatigue performance. At 94 MPa, the heat-treated samples survived beyond the nominal fatigue life, outperforming the reference cast material. The combined effect of machining and heat treatment yielded parts with far superior fatigue properties, promoting the material for a wider range of applications.

Subfields: Automotive Engineering, Mechanical Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e649d8535e28cf2a76b600299f5a8645ca5613f9

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. Nima Shamsaei
2. A. Fatemi
3. Ian Ashcroft
4. N. Phan
5. Christopher John Tuck
6. L. Parry
7. N. Aboulkhair
8. R. Molaei

In Mechanical Engineering

1. Nima Shamsaei
2. Ian Ashcroft
3. A. Fatemi
4. Christopher John Tuck
5. N. Phan
6. L. Parry
7. R. Molaei
8. N. Aboulkhair

Citations in the corpus

• Review of Powder Bed Fusion Additive Manufacturing for Metals (2021, result): “The same results were reported in another study [316].”
• Additive manufacturing of fatigue resistant materials: Challenges and opportunities (2017, background): “[67] showed very close fatigue resistance for as-built (Ra = 17 lm) and machined (Ra = 0.”
• 3D printing of Aluminium alloys: Additive Manufacturing of Aluminium alloys using selective laser melting (2019, methodology): “Post-processing techniques, such as mechanical machining, polishing, or blasting, to improve the parts’ surface roughness have all been reported in the literature [123].”
• Manufacturability of AlSi10Mg overhang structures fabricated by laser powder bed fusion (2018, background): “A wide range of metallic materials have been successfully processed using LPBF in the past few years, including aluminium [3-5], titanium [6,7] and nickel [8-10] and these elements’ alloys and composites.”
• Torsional fatigue behavior of wrought and additive manufactured Ti-6Al-4V by powder bed fusion including surface finish effect (2017, background): “In addition, according to the literature, it could be due to the induced ductility and microstructure transformation [18], although no change in ductility was observed after the annealing process in this study (see Fig.”