The density of the solidified material and the surface roughness of the finished components are complex functions of the material characteristics and the process parameters.
When studying the melting and solidification processes, considering individual powder particles reveals details about several physical phenomena, for instance the relationship between capillary effects, wetting conditions and the local stochastic powder configuration. This can help elucidate the fundamental mechanisms responsible for the phenomena involved in pores formation and surface roughness development that are observed during selective beam melting [1].
Factors affecting the appearance of vertical thin walls
- “Powder” effect: spreading and solidification
The first layer of our example thin walls is melted directly on the preheated building substrate (760C). Two things occur:
- Recoating: the first 100μm-thick powder layer is rather scarce and inhomogeneous
- Solidification: the localised melt pool geometries are a bit random.
- Layer thickness
The layer thickness is one of the main process parameters for layer based additive manufacturing processes. For SEBM, the layer thickness typically varies between 50 and 150μm.
When investigating the effect of the layer thickness on the resolution and aspect of thin walls during SEBM, results show the quality of the walls decreases dramatically with increasing layer thickness.
For a fixed beam energy:
When the line energy is adapted to the layer thickness in such a way that the total energy input per volume is the same for all layer thicknesses (proportionally smaller energy input for thinner layers):
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- Influence of beam energy and scanning speed
The mean thickness of the thin walls increases in tune with increasing line energies.
For a fixed line energy, the appearance of the walls varies with the scanning speed. When increasing scanning speed and beam power (to keep line energy constant), the wall thickness and the surface roughness increase. The interaction time between beam and powder is reduced as the total energy input remains the same.
The aspect of thin wall built using SEBM is highly sensitive to processing parameters: powder particles, layer thickness, beam energy, scanning speed. The final surface roughness is generally higher than what would be expected from the mean powder particle diameter.
1] Carolin K¨orner, Andreas Bauereiß and Elham Attar, Fundamental consolidation mechanisms during selective beam melting of powders, Modelling Simul. Mater. Sci. Eng. 21 (2013) 085011 (18pp) doi:10.1088/0965-0393/21/8/085011
[2] K¨orner C and Attar E 2011 Mesoscopic simulation of selective beam melting processes J. Mater. Process.Technol. 211 978–87