Adam Schaub

A ROUND ROBIN STUDY FOR LASER BEAM MELTING IN A METAL POWDER BED

With recent developments in additive manufacturing, there has been a keen interest in understanding its possibilities and limitations specifically with respect to the conventional engineering and manufacturing standards. Although coined as a prototyping technology at the time of its inception, Additive manufacturing with its characteristic layer by layer fabrication methodology is now the focus of end product manufacturing for many niche applications. One of the key additive manufacturing processes leading this evolution is the process of Laser Beam Melting in metal powder bed. With its ability to fabricate fully dense 3-dimensional structures by selectively melting micro-sized metal powder, Laser Beam Melting is being considered by many as a significant complimentary technology to the conventional forming and subtractive manufacturing processes. In order to completely understand the abilities and limitations of the Laser Beam Melting process, a detailed analysis of the system technology, process and user induced variations in relation to the characteristics of the resultant part needs to be performed. With the above motivations in mind, an initiative at the Collaborative Working Group, Lasers in production at the International Academy of Production Engineering (CIRP) was undertaken to conduct a comparative study in the form of a Round Robin test by analyzing the mechanical characteristics of samples fabricated by various users of the Laser Beam Melting technology from volunteers within the members of the academy. The presented paper illustrates the design and methodology of the round robin test in addition to some preliminary results and makes an attempt to connect these results with the various phenomena occurring in the Laser Beam Melting process. Authors of the paper gratefully acknowledge the contributions from the various members of the Collaborative Working Group, Lasers in production at the International Academy of Production Engineering (CIRP) who volunteered for providing the samples for the conducted round robin test.

High power laser beam melting of Ti6Al4V on formed sheet metal to achieve hybrid structures

Motivated by the desire to combine the advantages of two manufacturing concepts, namely Additive Manufacturing and sheet metal forming, the concept of hybrid processes emerged. Laser Beam Melting process with its characteristic layer by layer fabrication methodology has already been proved to be successful in fabricating fully dense 3D structures with micro sized Ti6Al4V powder. The presented research focuses on direct fabrication of Ti6 Al4V Additive Structures on a thin pre-formed Ti6 Al4V sheet metal substrate. In the state of the art Laser Beam Melting process, fabrication of solid structures is done on a support structure attached to a thick conventionally manufactured base plate. The state of the art process also uses a 200°C pre-heating of the fabrication platform in order to reduce the effect of heat induced stresses on the fabricated structures. Within the hybrid fabrication concept, 3D structures are directly fabricated on a thin sheet metal and the thermodynamic conditions are significantly different in comparison to the conventional process. The research aims at understanding the fundamental aspects of the interaction between the formed sheet metal and additive structure determines the corresponding mechanical characteristics. The interaction process during the fabrication exposes the alloy locally to non-optimum thermal cycles and the research therefore aims to understand the various influencing factors involved during the fabrication process. The system technology modifications required to achieve the aimed fabrication are also discussed in the presented research.

Mechanical Testing of Additive Manufactured Metal Parts

The quality of additive manufactured parts however depends pretty much on the workers experience to control porosity, layer linkage and surface roughness. To analyze the robustness of the Laser Beam Melting (LBM) process a Round Robin test was made in which specimens from four institutes from different countries were tested and compared. For the tests each institute built a set of specimens out of stainless steel 1.4540. The aim of this work is to analyze the influence of the process parameters on the mechanical properties. The results show that there is a high potential for additive manufacturing but also a lot of further research is necessary to optimize this technology.

Characterization of Hybrid Components Consisting of SEBM Additive Structures and Sheet Metal of Alloy Ti-6Al-4V

Within this paper the characterization of hybrid components consisting of selective electron beam melting (SEBM) additive structures and sheet metal of alloy Ti-6Al-4V will be presented. Key idea of the new production approach is the combination of the advantages of two different manufacturing processes. On the one hand the very high flexibility of the additive manufacturing process and on the other hand the economic production of conventional geometries by deep drawing operations. Main challenge within this new and innovative process is the identification and quality of the properties of the new hybrid components after the manufacturing process. The necessary evaluation consists of three parts: the analysis of the deep drawing blanks, the additive manufactured structure and finally the connection between both. Whereas standardized testing methods are available for the testing of the blanks and the additive structure, there are hardly scientific publication which deals with the investigation of the connection between them. Therefore, a new testing methods and consequently a new tool design was developed in order analyze the specimens in dependency of different strain- and stress conditions. At the end microstructural investigations were performed to identify the fundamental mechanisms which lead to the different properties on macroscopic scale. The result proofed that in particular the electron beam power has a high influence on the production process and thereby the connection quality.

Mechanical Response of Ti-6Al-4V Alloy on Deformation at Moderate Temperatures

Due to beneficial characteristics such as high specific strength, corrosion resistance and biocompatibility Ti-6Al-4V alloy has become the most important industrially produced titanium alloy during the last decades. Commonly used for aerospace technology and medical products, nowadays Ti-6Al-4V covers 50% of the worldwide produced titanium alloy parts. Different deformation operations as forging and casting as well as machining are used to shape titanium alloy components. For sheet metals, cost and time of fabrication can be reduced significantly via the near net shape technology sheet metal forming. Materials such as the α + β alloy Ti-6Al-4V with high yield stress and comparatively low elastic modules need to be formed at elevated temperatures to increase their formability. Numerical simulations are applied to calculate the forming behavior during the process and conclude the characteristics of the shaped part. Therefore in this paper the mechanical behavior of this titanium alloy is investigated by uniaxial tensile test within elevated temperatures ranging from 250 to 500 °C. Finally, the experimental results are adapted to models which predict the flow response in order to describe material behavior in finite element analysis of the forming process.

A New Process Chain for Joining Sheet Metal to Fibre Composite Sheets

Mixed-Materials parts have great light-weight potential for the automotive application to reduce the carbon footprint. But the joining of fibre composite plastic sheets to metal sheets is in practical application limited to adhesive bonding or mechanical joining with additional fastener elements due to the large differences in physical properties. A new process chain based on plastic joining without fastener elements is proposed and first results on the mechanism and on the achievable strength of the new joints are shown. The process chain consists of three steps: First joining pins are added to the sheet metal by an additive manufacturing process. In a second step these pins are pierced through the fibre composite sheet with a local heating of the thermoplastic in an overlap setup. In the third and last step the joint is created by forming the pins with the upsetting process to create a shape lock. The shear strength of the joined specimens was tested in a tensile testing machine. The paper shows that even with a non-optimized initial setup joints can be realised and that the new process chain is a possible alternative to adhesive bonding.

Development of a New Method for Producing Plane Expanded Metal by Laser Cutting and Forming of Metal Plates under Uniaxial Tension

The on-going trend to lightweight construction leads to a special focus on plane lattice structures as an alternative for solid metal plates. They demonstrate similar mechanical properties while taking up only a fraction of the normal material input and are thus economically favourable. Additionally, they fulfil functional and design aspects and therefore are used by several industries like the automobile. Nevertheless, the two most common types of lattice structures – perforated metal plates and expended metal plates – are either waste intensive or uneven and hence require additional rolling of the metal plate.Therefore, within this contribution a new and innovative approach for the production of plane lattice structures will be presented. The manufacturing process thereby consists of two steps. At first, a specially designed pattern is cut into metal plates via a laser. Subsequently, the plates are formed under uniaxial tension to realize the lattice structures. Based on the cutting length, cutting space and the row space different blanks with tailored lattice structures can be produced. From the experimental results first guidelines for the design of suitable patterns are derived. The investigations will be performed with precipitation hardenable aluminium AA6014.

Experimental Investigation of Ti-6Al-4V with a Biaxial Tensile Test Setup at Elevated Temperature

The requirement for products to reduce weight while maintaining strength is a major challenge to the development of new advanced materials. Especially in the field of human medicine or aviation and aeronautics new materials are needed to satisfy increasing demands. Therefore the titanium alloy Ti-6Al-4V with its high specific strength and an outstanding corrosion resistance is used for high and reliable performance in sheet metal forming processes as well as in medical applications. Due to a meaningful and accurate numerical process design and to improve the prediction accuracy of the numerical model, advanced material characterization methods are required. To expand the formability and to skillfully use the advantage of Ti-6Al-4V, forming processes are performed at elevated temperatures. Thus the investigation of plastic yielding at different stress states and at an elevated temperature of 400°C is presented in this paper. For this reason biaxial tensile tests with a cruciform shaped specimen are realized at 400°C in addition to uniaxial tensile tests. Moreover the beginning of plastic yielding is analyzed in the first quadrant of the stress space with regard to complex material modeling.

Analysis of the Deformation Behavior of Ti-6Al-4V at Elevated Temperatures

Titanium alloys, such as Ti-6Al-4V, offer favorable characteristics as significant strength, biocompatibility and metallurgical stability at elevated temperatures. These advantages afford the application of parts out of Ti-6Al-4V in a wide field within aerospace, astronautic and medical technologies. Most applied shaping operations for parts out of titanium alloys are forging, casting, forming and machining. In order to develop and improve forming operations numerical simulations are applied during preprocessing. For that purpose mechanical properties of the material such as yield stress and Lankford parameter have to be determined. Due to the two-phase (α + β) microstructure of Ti-6Al-4V, forming operations have to be carried out at elevated temperatures to reduce the required forming force and extend forming limits. Taking the temperature and stress state dependency of the material into consideration, uniaxial tensile and compression tests are accomplished at elevated temperatures, ranging from 400 to 600 °C. Furthermore, the experimentally determined yield stress and Lankford parameter are approximated with the yield loci model proposed by Barlat 2000. The model predicts the flow response of the material, thus provides input data for the finite element analysis of forming processes at different temperature levels.