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Balling behavior of stainless steel and nickel powder during selective laser melting process

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Abstract

Balling phenomenon, as a typical selective laser melting (SLM) defect, is detrimental to the forming quality. In this work, a detailed investigation into the balling behavior of selective laser melting of stainless steel and pure nickel powder was conducted. It was found that the SLM balling phenomenon can be divided into two types generally: the ellipsoidal balls with dimension of about 500 μm and the spherical balls with dimension of about 10 μm. The former is caused by worsened wetting ability and detrimental to SLM quality; the latter has no obvious detriment to SLM quality. The oxygen content plays an important role in determining the balling initiation, which can be considerably lessened by decreasing the oxygen content of atmosphere to 0.1%. A high laser line energy density, which can be obtained by applying high laser power and low scan speed, could enable a well-wetting characteristic. The effect of scan interval on balling initiation is not obvious as long as the scan track is continuous. The surface remelting procedure can also alleviate the balling effect in a certain extent, due to the melting and wetting of metal balls. Moreover, the balling phenomenon of pure nickel was also studied, and the results implied that the balling discipline had a universality.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Solidification Processing, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an, 710072, People’s Republic of China

    Ruidi Li

  2. Heilongjiang Institute of Science and Technology, Harbin, 150027, People’s Republic of China

    Jinhui Liu

  3. State Key Laboratory of Material Processing and Die & Mould Technology, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, 430074, People’s Republic of China

    Yusheng Shi, Li Wang & Wei Jiang

Authors
  1. Ruidi Li
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  2. Jinhui Liu
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  3. Yusheng Shi
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  4. Li Wang
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  5. Wei Jiang
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Correspondence to Ruidi Li.

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Li, R., Liu, J., Shi, Y. et al. Balling behavior of stainless steel and nickel powder during selective laser melting process. Int J Adv Manuf Technol 59, 1025–1035 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00170-011-3566-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00170-011-3566-1

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