PSI - Issue 53

S. Leonardi et al. / Procedia Structural Integrity 53 (2024) 327–337

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S. Leonardi et al. / Structural Integrity Procedia 00 (2023) 000–000

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Fig. 3. Results of the topological analysis onto the AlSi10Mg cellular test samples: (a-c) optical micrographs and probability distributions of the pore aspect ratio (d-f) and radius (g-i). The mean value µ and the standard deviation σ are also reported. Specifically, (a,d,g), (b,e,h) and (c,f,i) correspond respectively to the micrograph and the resulting topological descriptors for test samples Al-30, Al-40 and Al-50 in Table 4. For each porous architecture designed to contain equisized circular pores, the nominal pore radius is highlighted with a dotted red line. Scale bar: 3mm.

While metallurgical defects are present in all manufactured samples, they are observed to be higher in porous test samples manufactured out of AlSi10Mg powders. This is expected as this powder is known to be highly prone to absorb water molecules and also very sensitive to storage conditions (Riener et al. (2021)). Finally, it is also noted in passing, that the pore features exhibited by the AlSi10Mg are found to be less circular in shape when compared with those of the Inconel 625 samples. This di ff erence can have several origins, and notably it can be rationalized on account of the di ff erent energy density and contour strategy used between the two metallic powders. The energy density can in turn a ff ect the size of the melt pool (De Terris et al. (2021); Traore et al. (2022); Zhao et al. (2022)) and hence the manufactured pore geometry.

4. Discussion

Collectively, the results of this work highlight the suitability of the LPBF process for the fabrication of complex cellular geometries with random pore features. This is consistent with prior work showing the design versatility o ff ered by LPBF additive manufacturing (Du Plessis et al. (2019)). Equally important, the results presented in Section 3 are in agreement with earlier studies on metallic lattices produced by LPBF (Liu et al. (2017); Dallago et al. (2018)).