Research on metallurgical bonding of selective laser melted AlSi10Mg alloy

Abstract The densification behavior, surface morphology and attendant microstructural characteristics of the selective laser melting (SLM) processed AlSi10Mg alloy affected by the processing parameters were systematically investigated. Increasing the laser scanning speed or hatch spacing will deteriorate the metallurgical bonding between melt pools, resulting in the increase of irregular pores. Scanning speed and hatch spacing affect the liquid metallurgical bonding of melt pools in different ways. By manipulating scanning speed, the shape of the melt pool changes, resulting in different extents of metallurgical bonding. Whereas hatch spacing influences the resultant metallurgical bonding by controlling the overlapping rate between neighboring scan tracks simply. The formations of the hierarchical microstructures which discriminated by the Si phase are elucidated. Coarse zones are formed by the instantaneous existence of extremely high ratio of thermal gradient (G) and solidification rate (R) at the melt pool boundary, where solidification microstructure grows planar. Fine zones are formed by columnar-dendritic growth of microstructure. During the solidification process, the contraction forces that generated by the trapped gas in the pores and gravity are applied to the liquid around irregular pores and, forms the porous microstructures different from that in dense areas eventually. The tensile tests reveal that the tensile properties of SLM-processed samples are significantly affected by the formation of porosity.