Metal Additive Manufacturing Conference - MAMC 2020

While already widespread for cladding, the Laser Blown Powder process is also becoming a major tool for 3D printing, with applications such as engine turbine repair. Some of them include deposition of thin-walled structure over a substrate with highly variable topography. Resulting deposition angles can affect the final wall geometry and could be detrimental for thin structures with tight tolerances. This investigation aims to understand how those angles can change the deposition mechanism of such features. Considering a toolpath between two points on a randomly oriented surface, two angles can be defined with regard to the longitudinal and traverse slopes. A design of experiment was created by varying both angles from 0º to ±15º to look at the evolution of the build for straight walls of four layers.