Abrasive fluidized bed finishing to improve the fatigue behaviour of Ti6Al4V parts fabricated by electron beam melting

The high mechanical performance, resistance to corrosion, biocompatibility and low density of titanium alloys make them a key material for the industry [1]. Typical applications of titanium alloys are in the aerospace and marine sectors, taking advantage of the corrosion behaviour and the good strength-to-weight ratio; moreover, these alloys are also largely used in the medical field, where biocompatibility is a crucial aspect [2, 3]. Among the production technologies, additive manufacturing (AM) techniques are of great interest, since they allow combining the titanium alloys properties with the ability of AM to produce complex net-shaped parts, reducing component weight, raw material and additional tooling [4]. Additive manufacturing (AM) technologies have the potential of adding flexibility to products, allowing for design freedom, and to the production process since AM can rapidly respond to variations in product mix or design. Adding flexibility in manufacturing is a crucial point at the production level since the market demand is even more mutable and the product lifetime shorter [5].

Laser powder bed fusion (L-PBF) and electron beam melting (EBM) have emerged as the leading metal-based AM technologies for industrial production for a wide variety of metallic alloys, including titanium alloys [6, 7]. A computer-aided design (CAD) model is built up layer-by-layer in AM, regardless of the complexity of the model geometry. At each incremental step, the raw material is selectively melted by the energy source, a laser in L-PBF or an electron beam in EBM. EBM and L-PBF processes are anyway not competing; rather they offer different advantages for different types of applications [8]. EBM and L-PBF parts of identical material are characterized by significantly different microstructures and mechanical properties, and the surface topology and quality are also distinctive [9, 10]. In general, finer geometrical details and smoother surfaces are obtained by L-PBF, whereas higher productivity, lower oxygen contamination and minimal residual stresses are characteristics of EBM. High residual stresses are typically developed in L-PBF components due to the high temperature gradients, while EBM parts are almost stress-free since the powder bed is maintained at elevated temperatures during all the building process [11‐13]. Thus, stress relieving heat treatment that is required in L-PBF is avoided in EBM. Differently, after production EBM parts of titanium alloys may undergo hot isostatic pressing (HIP) treatment to further enhance mechanical properties, especially in terms of fatigue endurance, since internal voids or porosities that act as stress-concentrating areas are closed by the HIP process [14].

In EBM parts, the surface roughness is quite high, ranging from 10 to 40 μm. This is a characteristic of metal AM components, originated by the melting and solidification of the powder. In case the surface roughness is excessive, for some applications the AM parts might not comply with the requirements of mechanical design. The surface quality of the additive manufactured metal parts highly affects the fatigue behaviour. An increase in the roughness is detrimental to the fatigue life of a component, also when additively manufactured [15, 16]. The relation between the fatigue properties and the surface morphology is well established in the literature. In Nicoletto et al. [17], the influence of roughness and morphology of AM surfaces on the fatigue performances was quantified by performing fatigue tests on smooth specimens of titanium alloy, built along different orientations in the building volume. The study was conducted both on L-PBF and EBM specimens. The higher roughness of EBM parts led to a lower fatigue limit than L-PBF parts; however, the results showed a fairly isotropic fatigue behaviour of EBM specimens. Surface roughness can be reduced by EBM parameters’ optimization or by an appropriate finishing process. Machining processes are commonly used to obtain good surface finish and close tolerances [18]. However, elaborated external surfaces and internal ones may not be easily accessible to machining tools, thus keeping the original as-built surface roughness. The resulting relatively poor fatigue strength is the most significant acceptability challenge of AM technology when considered for the production of net-shape parts, such as for load-bearing applications [19, 20]. The attention has been thus recently paid on unconventional finishing processes that are an alternative to machining, suitable for AM parts [21].

Since the finish quality of additive manufactured metal components is still an issue, in this work a feasibility study of the abrasive fluidized bed (AFB) finishing process is proposed, to quantify what improvement of fatigue behaviour of Ti6Al4V parts produced by EBM can be obtained, if the surface roughness is reduced by AFB. AFB is a promising technology, based on the use of loose abrasives taken in a fluid state [22]. The fluidized abrasives surround the component as a liquid medium, and the complex surfaces that are typical of AM parts can be finished since the geometry is not a constraint [23]. Moreover, the impact of the abrasives on the part surfaces occurs at high speed due to the combination of the movements of the part and the fluidized bed. The influence of the change in the angle of impact has been studied by the authors and described in Pietrobono et al. [24]. This makes the AFB process more effective than other conventional or unconventional finishing technologies based on abrasives [25].

In the present study, axial-symmetric samples aligned with the build direction were fabricated by EBM. A stainless-steel media was selected to generate the abrasive fluidized bed inside which samples were rotated at high speed. The relative motion of abrasive particles and the workpiece is composed by the rotation of the sample around its axis and of the upward movement of the abrasive media. The fatigue failure of as-built and treated samples was determined by rotating bending tests. The surfaces of the samples were characterized by using Field Emission Gun Scanning Electron Microscopy (FEG-SEM) and contact gauge profilometry. The effect of the treatment time (5 h, 7.5 h and 10 h) and of the sample rotational speed (4800 rpm and 6000 rpm) on morphological features and fatigue life was investigated. Modifications of the surface properties after AFB were related to the achieved improvements on the fatigue life.

An axial-symmetric sample (Fig. 1) having basically the geometry of a fatigue test specimen was designed in order to systematically investigate the influence of AFB treatments on fatigue life of parts fabricated by EBM. The sample total length is 175.8 mm and consists of two parts. The right side in Fig. 1 represents the fatigue sample geometry according to the ISO 1143:2010 standard [26]; it is 105.8 in length, which includes the test zone of 12 mm long and 6 mm in diameter. The left side, in light grey colour in Fig. 1, is an additional cylindrical part, 70 mm long and 12 mm in diameter, that was used to clamp the sample in the AFB apparatus during the finishing treatment and was cut off immediately at the end of the finishing treatment.

Forty axial-symmetric samples in total were fabricated (Fig. 2). Samples were built using an Arcam EBM A2X system and Ti6Al4V ELI (Grade 23) gas-atomized powder with a particle size distribution ranging from 45 to 105 μm, both supplied by Arcam EBM (Mölnlycke, Sweden). The layer thickness was 50 μm. All the building process was performed under vacuum. Before starting the building process, an initial pressure of 1∙10⁻⁵ mbar was obtained in the chamber. During the actual melting process, helium was introduced in the chamber with a controlled vacuum of 2∙10⁻³ mbar. The fabrication of each layer consists of mainly four steps: powder spreading, dual-stage preheating, melting and postheating. During the preheating step, a defocused beam of electrons heats, up to 650 °C, the freshly spread powder in order to partially consolidate the material. The preheating comprises two stages. In the first stage named preheat 1, a light sinter of the new powder layer is performed on the bounding area that includes the cross-sections of all the parts, and then, in the second stage named preheat 2, the preheated area is restricted to the regions corresponding to each part of the cross-sections in order to increase the local sintering of the powder. Then in the melting step, the powder is selectively melted according to the bi-dimensional cross-section computed during the slicing phase of the CAD data. Also, the melting step is performed in two stages, namely, contour and hatching. During the melting step, the EBM Control software evaluates the amount of energy transferred into the powder bed. A postheating stage is performed if the transferred energy is not enough to keep the temperature of the powder bed constant. In the postheating stage, the same parameters of preheat 1 are used. The standard sets (themes) of process parameters for Ti6Al4V were adopted [27]. In details, themes named Ti6Al4V A2X-PreHeat-50um-5.0.61 and Ti6Al4V A2X-Melt-50um-5.0.61 were used for the preheating/postheating and melting steps respectively, and the relevant process parameters are listed in Table 1. The total build time was 3310 min (55 h and 10 min) including the processing time of 2911 min (48 h and 31 min) and the final cooling down.

After additive manufacture, twenty-five samples were treated by AFB. As illustrated in the research flowchart of Fig. 3, the remaining fifteen samples were used to investigate the properties of the as-built AM material. The AFB apparatus includes an air supply system and a vertical fluidization column. The column is 500 mm in height and 100 mm in diameter (Fig. 4a). The abrasive media in the bed was uniformly fluidized through a porous plate distributor. The cylindrical part of the samples was clamped by a collet chuck, and the test geometry was kept in the inner part of the fluidization column (Fig. 4b). Samples were rotated to ensure process uniformity on the whole surface and exposed for different treatment times (5 h, 7.5 h and 10 h) to repeated impacts by the incoming stainless-steel powder (Type S, mesh size 12 μm, angular stainless-steel grit, 64 HRC). The powder was not replaced during experiments due to the long life of this abrasive media when used for Ti6Al4V finishing in AFB. To realize fast machining speed, the samples were rotated at high speed into the fluidized bed. Two rotating speeds were tested: 4800 rpm and 6000 rpm. The minimum airflow, necessary to fluidize the abrasive particles, was supplied to establish a minimum fluidization regime as detailed in Kunii and Levenspiel [28]. The fluidizing gas (purified air) and the abrasive particles were both inert, and there were no reactions inside the fluidized bed.

The morphology evolution caused by the interaction between the fluidized abrasives and the titanium samples was analysed by using a Leo SUPRA 35-FEG-SEM by Zeiss (Thornwood, NY, USA) and by a Talysurf CLI 200 contact gauge profilometer by Taylor Hobson (Leicester, UK). Three-dimensional maps, 3 × 4 mm², were acquired, with spacing 2 μm and measurement speed 200 μm/s. A Gaussian filter was adopted. Specifically, the surface morphology after finishing was captured by storing profiles along the longitudinal direction. Each profile was 7 mm long, the spacing 20 μm and the measurement speed 500 μm/s. All the bi-dimensional roughness parameters were evaluated with this approach. For each working condition, three repetitions of the test (processing and characterization) were performed in order to evaluate the average roughness parameters and standard deviations. Thus, the influence of the operational parameters, namely, treatment time and sample rotational speed, on the obtainable surface finish was assessed.

An MTS Alliance RT/100 universal testing machine by MTS Systems Corporation (Eden Prairie, MN, USA) equipped with MTS 634.12-5x extensometer, gage length 25 mm and travel 12.5 mm was used to perform the static tensile tests. Tensile tests are required in order to evaluate mechanical properties data that are needed for the subsequent fatigue tests.

The fatigue failure of as-built and treated samples was evaluated by adopting a rotating bending testing procedure. A 2TM831 rotating bending machine by Italsigma (Forlì, Italy) was used. Once fixed the load to 7.8 kg, for each treatment condition, the number of cycles to failure, N, was determined. Thus, the condition beneficial to fatigue life was identified. For this condition and as-built samples, further fatigue tests were performed, and the load was varied to build the S-N curves. Profilometry and SEM analyses allowed interpreting the improvement in the fatigue life observed on the treated samples.

The results of the experimental campaign are presented in the following subsections, specifically describing the surface characteristics, the dimensional and mass change and the static and fatigue properties of the samples before and after AFB finishing.

Finishing of electron beam melting (EBM) additively manufactured Ti6Al4V samples was performed by rotating them inside an abrasive fluidized bed (AFB). The treatment was found to improve the finishing and, for appropriate AFB process conditions, the fatigue behaviour of samples. The sample rotational speed was influential on the effectiveness of finishing and fatigue life of samples. From this study some relevant conclusions can be drawn as follows:

These promising results encourage the study of the AFB process for finishing AM components. Additional treatment as the hot isostatic pressing (HIP) could improve the fatigue behaviour by closing internal pores. Thus, the combination of AFB finishing and HIP may be a viable solution for the complex geometries of AM parts. Further works include the optimization of the combination of process parameters to enhance the productivity and the evaluation of the repeatability of the finishing process.