Precipitation behaviour of additively manufactured 15-5 precipitation hardened steel

Additive manufacturing (AM) technology has gained popularity in recent times due to flexibility in producing complex geometries with advanced rapid prototyping machines.Laser-based Powder Bed Fusion (L-PBF) is a metal AM process that can be used to build metallic components layer by layer by moving a focused laser beam in a particular pattern along each metal powder layer.The mechanical properties of laser-based additive manufactured parts are reported to be comparable to or better than their conventional counterparts.In the L-PBF process, finegrained structures are formed due to the high cooling rates of the molten pool, which results in considerably good tensile strength.Among the precipitation hardening steels, 15-5 PH steels are one of the main classes of materials with good potential for production using the additive manufacturing process of PBF-LB, with a broad range of applications in the automotive, shipping, medical and aerospace sectors.