Laser powder-bed fusion (LPBF) has significantly gained in importance and has become one of the major fabrication techniques within metal additive manufacturing. The fast cooling rates achieved in LPBF due to a relatively small melt pool on a much larger component or substrate, acting as heat sink, result in fine-grained microstructures and high oversaturation of alloying elements in the α-aluminum. Al-Si-Mg alloys thus can be effectively precipitation hardened. Moreover, the solidified material undergoes an intrinsic heat treatment, whilst the layers above are irradiated and the elevated temperature in the built chamber starts the clustering process of alloying elements directly after a scan track is fabricated. These silicon-magnesium clusters were observed with atom probe tomography in as-built samples. Similar beneficial clustering behavior at higher temperatures is known from the direct-aging approach in cast samples, whereby the artificial aging is performed immediately after solution annealing and quenching. Transferring this approach to LPBF samples as a possible post-heat treatment revealed that even after direct aging, the outstanding hardness of the as-built condition could, at best, be met, but for most instances it was significantly lower. Our investigations showed that LPBF Al-Si-Mg exhibited a high dependency on the quenching rate, which is significantly more pronounced than in cast reference samples, requiring two to three times higher quenching rate after solution annealing to yield similar hardness results. This suggests that due to the finer microstructure and the shorter diffusion path in Al-Si-Mg fabricated by LPBF, it is more challenging to achieve a metastable oversaturation necessary for precipitation hardening. This may be especially problematic in larger components.
This study is concerned with the linear elasticity theory for bodies with a dipolar structure. In this context, we approach transient elastic processes and the steady state in a cylinder consisting of such kind of body which is only subjected to some boundary restrictions at a plane end. We will show that at a certain distance d=d(t), which can be calculated, from the loaded plan, the deformation of the body vanishes. For the points of the cylinder located at a distance less than d, we will use an appropriate measure to assess the decreasing of the deformation relative to the distance from the loaded plane end. The fact that the measure, that assess the deformation, decays with respect to the distance at the loaded end is the essence of the principle of Saint-Venant.
This paper aims to analyze the stress and strain states appearing in the elbow of a tube, such as those commonly used in a city’s water supply network. The stress field is characterized by the fact that there is a significant stress increase when compared to a straight tube. As a result, the strength of such an elbow must be investigated and guaranteed for such a network to be well designed. A practical solution used is to anchor the elbow in a massive concrete block. The paper compares the stress field that occurs in the elbow when it is free, buried in the ground, and when it is anchored in a massive concrete block. Furthermore, we investigate how a crack appears and propagates in the elbow. This happens especially for the elbow buried in the ground where the stress and strain are higher than when the elbow is anchored in concrete. The results obtained can be used in the current practice in the case of water supply networks made by high-density polyethylene pipes.
In our study, we consider the linear mixed initial boundary value problem for a porous elastic body having a dipolar structure. The equations that describe the elastic dipolar deformations are coupled with the equations which describe the evolution of the voids by means of certain coefficients. Our main result proves the continuous dependence of solutions for the mixed problem with regard to the coefficients which perform this coupling. Using an adequate measure, we can evaluate the continuous dependence by means of some estimate regarding the gradient of deformations and the gradient of the function that describes the evolution of the voids.