Wire arc additive manufacturing of high-strength low alloy steels: study of process parameters and their influence on the bead geometry and mechanical characteristics

Additive manufacturing (AM) is becoming increasingly popular since it offers flexibility to produce complex designs with less tooling and minimum material at shorter lead times. Wire arc additive manufacturing (WAAM) is a variant of additive manufacturing which allows economical production of large-scale and high-density parts. The WAAM process has been studied extensively on different steels; however, the influence of process parameters, specifically wire feed speed (WFS), travel speed (TS), and their ratio on bead geometry, microstructure, and mechanical properties, are yet to be studied. The present work aims at closing this gap by using the WAAM process with robotic cold metal transfer (CMT) technology to manufacture high-strength structural steel parts. For that purpose, single-bead welds were produced from HSLA steel by varying WFS between 5 and 10 m/min and the WFS to TS ratio between 10 and 20. Those variations produce heat inputs in the range of 266–619 J/mm. The results have shown that the wire feed speed to travel speed ratio is the major parameter to control the heat input. Increasing heat input increases characteristic bead dimension, whereas it reduces the hardness. In the second part of experiments, two single-bead walls were deposited via the parallel deposition strategy and one multiple-bead wall was produced using the oscillation strategy. The tensile properties were tested along two directions: parallel and perpendicular to deposition directions. For the yield strength and tensile strength, the difference between horizontally and vertically tested specimens was smaller than the standard deviations. On the other hand, the total and uniform elongation values exhibit up to 10% difference in the test direction, indicating anisotropy in ductility. Those tensile properties were attributed to repeated thermal cycles during the WAMM process, which can cause heat transfer in multiple directions. The yield strength of the multiple-bead wall produced via oscillation was lower, whereas its ductility was higher. The tensile properties and hardness differences were found to correlate well with the microstructure.