Metal Additive Manufacturing Conference 2018

Additive manufacturing (AM) technology is widely used to fabricate complex 3D products directly from CAD file. Selective laser melting (SLM) is considered as the most important AM techniques that can produce high-quality Tool Steel products as dies for Aluminium High-Pressure Die Casting. Traditional techniques face significant challenges such as mold design complexity and water cooling system channels which depends on part geometry and are needed to release die temperature from molten aluminium from 650°C to around 25°C. Optimizing of additive manufacturing technology is highly demanded to meet fabrication of high-quality dies from Tool Steel. Based on the variation of scanning speed of laser, layer thickness and laser power, the Additive Manufacturing technology was adapted to produce H13 Tool steel required for Rapid tooling applications. In this work,The mechanical properties of tool steel dies were determined using tensile test, impact toughness and compression testing machines. The structure after SLM process was tracked using optical microscope as well as X-ray diffraction. The results showed the powerful effect of the scanning speed of laser, on mechanical properties and the observed structure of H13 hot work tool steels.