Microstructure and Mechanical Behaviour of Laser Metal Deposited Titanium Alloy
R.M. Mahamood and E.T. Akinlabi
Laser metal deposition (LMD) process is an additive manufacturing technology that is capable of producing complex part directly from the three-dimensional (3-D) computer-aided design (CAD) model of the part being produced simply by adding materials layer after layer. In this study, laser metal deposited Ti6Al4V was characterized in terms of the microstructure and microhardness. The influence of laser power on these properties was thoroughly investigated by varying the laser power between 1.0 and 3.2 kW while the scanning speed, powder flow rate and the gas flow rate were kept constant The results obtained reveals that the average microhardness increases as the laser power was increased. It was also observed in the microstructure, the presence of layer band or macroscopic banding which is phenomenon because it was only reported in the literature for multilayer deposits.
Keywords: Nd:YAG laser, titanium alloy, Ti6Al4V/TiC composite, laser material deposition (LMD), microstructure; microhardness; tensile strength, macroscopic banding