• Corpus ID: 244488605

Ripple formation and its effect on the multi-scale microstructure of Directed Energy Deposition (DED)-printed 316L components

@inproceedings{Balhara2021RippleFA,
  title={Ripple formation and its effect on the multi-scale microstructure of Directed Energy Deposition (DED)-printed 316L components},
  author={Himanshu Balhara and Bhaskar Botcha and Sarah Jeannette Wolff and Satish T. S. Bukkapatnam},
  year={2021}
}

• Himanshu Balhara, Bhaskar Botcha, +1 author S. Bukkapatnam
• Published 23 November 2021
• Materials Science

An experimental study is presented to characterize the ripple formations in the directed energy deposition (DED) process and to investigate the influence of ripples on the heterogeneous microstructure in the scan direction of DED-printed stainless steel (316L) components. While considerable studies on ripple formation exist in the welding literature, these formations in DED process have not received much attention. Also, little efforts exist on the microstructure along the scan direction (or the scan surface) as compared with the build direction. Experiments consisted of printing 10 mm ×10 mm ×10 mm cubical components on an Optomec LENS 500 hybrid machine tool under different laser power, scan speed and dwell time combinations, chosen according to a Latin hypercube design. The surface of the scan face of the prints was finished to a Ra < 30 nm and etched with Aqua regia for 90 sec. An optical microscope was employed to observe the microstructure at 4 different scales. The studies suggest a significant influence of ripple formations as well as the ripple width on the solidification front, the dendritic patterns as well as the heterogeneous microstructure.