Fatigue Performance Improvement of AlSi10Mg Manufactured by Selective Laser Melting through Heat Treatment
Author(s):
Mudda Nirish, R.Rajendra
Affiliation(s):
Department of Mechanical Engineering, University College of Engineering (A), Osmania University, Telangana, India.
Corresponding Author Email: [email protected]
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
The quality and performance of the additive manufactured (AM) parts depends on the build orientation. Therefore, in the present work, the rotation bending fatigue (RBF) was tested for two different materials, AlSi10Mg and Al6061. The study aims to identify two different conditions (i.e., room temperature and preheated at 2000C/2hrs) manufactured by the SLM-AlSi10Mg alloy. However, the fatigue performance of the AlSi10Mg alloy showed better results than the Al 6061-cast alloys because of the very fine microstructure and fine distribution of the Si phase in the AlSi10Mg SLM parts. These results indicate that most fatigue cracks are initiated by the unmelted defects of the sample surfaces. The SLM building orientation process is the most important for the improvement of fatigue strength. Moreover, the crack propagation mechanism is revealed by fracture analysis. The laser energy density was calculated based on the given process parameter as 150 J/mm3. The highest density achieved was 99.6% (2.660 g/cm3) and obtained defect-free components.