Development of an Empirical Model on Melt Pool Variation in Laser Foil Printing Additive Manufacturing Process Using Statistical Analysis

• Published in: Metallography, microstructure, and analysis microstructure, and analysis, 2021-10, Vol.10 (5), p.684-691
• Main Authors: Sehhat, M. Hossein, Behdani, Behrouz, Hung, Chia-Hung, Mahdianikhotbesara, Ali
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Additive manufacturing; Aluminum base alloys; Characterization and Evaluation of Materials; Chemistry and Materials Science; Empirical analysis; Laser beam welding; Lasers; Manufacturing; Materials Science; Mathematical models; Melting; Metal foils; Metallic Materials; Nanotechnology; Oxidation; Powder beds; Process parameters; Solidification; Statistical analysis; Structural Materials; Surfaces and Interfaces; Technical Article; Thin Films
• ISSN: 2192-9262; 2192-9270
• DOI: 10.1007/s13632-021-00795-x

Laser Foil Printing (LFP) is a novel recently developed Additive Manufacturing (AM) process that fabricates components using metal foils in a layer-by-layer fashion. LFP process has found to perform better than some other well-known AM methods, such as Laser Powder Bed Fusion (LPBF), especially for challenging materials, like aluminum alloys, due to the high oxidation level of aluminum powders during melting and solidification steps of LPBF process. Deployment of foil format feedstock in LFP alleviates such challenges by removing powder material utilization. The properties of LFP fabricated parts are found to be strongly influenced by the melt pool depths, created during laser welding step of LFP process. The melt pool depths themselves are dominated by LFP’s process parameters, such as laser power and scan speed. Therefore, the correct selection of process parameter values is necessary for fabricating parts with desirable properties. In this work, some aluminum parts were fabricated using LFP with various levels of laser power and scan speed and their melt pool depths were measured. By conducting a thorough statistical analysis on the results, the dependency of created melt pool depths on these process parameters is evaluated. An empirical model is also developed that can accurately predict the yielding melt pool depths as a function of given values per laser power and scan speed. The developed model’s fit level to experimental results is examined to validate the accuracy of predicted results.