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Additive manufacturing offers unique possibilities to produce complex components, which would not be possible or only very difficult to be realizable with conventional manufacturing processes. The potential of additive manufacturing of aluminum alloys has already been realized in prototyping, but still offers potential in the establishment of series applications. For enabling the establishment of additive manufacturing in series applications, comprehensive knowledge about the material behavior is necessary. This study examines the torsional behavior of additive manufactured AlSi10Mg samples and shows the correlation between tensile and torsional strength. Comprehensive torsion tests with strain gauges were performed and significant directional dependencies were shown. The correlation factor in the area of torsional yield strength/tensile yield strength and torsional strength/tensile strength was determined and was compared with the yield/failure conditions according to Tresca and von Mises.
Hot isostatic pressing can be utilized to reduce the anisotropic mechanical properties of Al–Si–Mg alloys fabricated by laser powder-bed fusion (L-PBF). The implementation of post processing densification processes can open up new fields of application by meeting high quality requirements defined by aircraft and automotive industries. A gas pressure of 75 MPa during hot isostatic pressing lowers the critical cooling rate required to achieve a supersaturated solid solution. Direct aging uses this pressure related effect during heat treatment in modern hot isostatic presses, which offer advanced cooling capabilities, thereby avoiding the necessity of a separate solution annealing step for Al–Si–Mg cast alloys. Hot isostatic pressing, followed by rapid quenching, was applied to both sand cast as well as laser powder-bed fused Al–Si–Mg aluminum alloys. It was shown that the critical cooling rate required to achieve a supersaturated solid solution is significantly higher for additively manufactured, age-hardenable aluminum alloys than it is for comparable sand cast material. The application of hot isostatic pressing can be combined with heat treatment, consisting of solution annealing, quenching and direct aging, in order to achieve both a dense material with a small number of preferred locations for the initiation of fatigue cracks and a high material strength.
Laser powder bed fusion has become one of the major techniques within metal additive manufacturing, especially when delicate structures and high geometric accuracy are concerned. Lately, the awareness of the material-specific macroscopic anisotropy has risen and led to widespread investigations on the static mechanical strength. However, little is known about the fracture behavior of the layer-wise fabricated metal components and their affinity of crack propagation between consecutive layers, which is particularly important for aluminium–silicon alloys containing embrittled zones in double-irradiated areas. A recent study indicated that there is a significant drop in fracture toughness in case the crack growth direction is parallel to the layering. To investigate this matter further and to shed light on the fracture toughness behavior in the range of a 0°–45° angle offset between the crack growth direction relative to the layering, notched samples with varying polar angles were subjected to mode I fracture toughness testing. Our results indicate that the fracture toughness is an almost-stable characteristic up to a mismatch of about 20° between the crack propagation path and the layering, at which point the fracture toughness decreases by up to 10%.
Laser powder-bed fusion has become one of the most important techniques in additive manufacturing. For guaranteeing the possibility of manufacturing highly specialized and advanced components, currently intensive research is carried out in this field. One area of this research is the material-specific macroscopic anisotropy, which is investigated in our work by comprehensive static mechanical experiments. The material which was tested within this study was the precipitation-hardenable AlSi10Mg alloy, with the focus on installation space orientation. Tensile and compression tests were performed, the results for the Young's modulus in compressive loading exceeded the previously known values of this material in tensile loading and achieved values of up to 79.8 GPa. As a result of this investigation, a chemical spectroscopic analysis was undertaken and from the actual chemical composition, a relative density of 99.86% of the samples was determined.