EUROPEAN CONGRESS AND EXHIBITION ON ADVANCED MATERIALS AND PROCESSES - EUROMAT 2021

Aluminium alloys have a wide range of applications, especially in the fields of aviation and aerospace. However, the complexity of the manufactured parts is sometimes limited when produced with conventional manufacturing processes. With the use of additive manufacturing techniques, near net-shape parts with a great structural complexity can be produced. When it comes to manufacturing aluminium alloys with laser beam powder bed fusion (LB-PBF), many issues can emerge. These are mainly due to the intrinsic material properties of aluminium – e.g. a high reflectance of the laser beam by the surface of the powder – which make these alloys difficult to process. This study concentrates on the printing of AlSi10Mg, a commercially available alloy widely used in AM, and AA5024, a promising Al-Mg alloy which was modified with Scandium and Zirconium to enhance its mechanical properties. The effects of different process parameters, as well as the influence of heat-treatments on the mechanical properties are discussed. For this purpose, the properties density, hardness, tensile strength and impact energy were investigated on both as-built and heat-treated samples. Microstructural analysis was performed with light optical microscopy and SEM-EBSD in order to understand the process-related phenomena and changes in material properties taking place during LB-PBF. Furthermore, new artificial intelligence models will be addressed to support the understanding and prediction of additively manufactured material properties (i.e. density and hardness) and their correlations with process parameters (e.g. laser power, scanning speed, layer height and hatching distance) .