Correlation between Productivity and Mechanical Performance of Ti-6Al-4V alloy produced via Laser Powder Bed Fusion Process

Selective Laser Melting (SLM) is one of foremost processes when it comes to Additive Manufacturing (AM). As the field of AM is growing, the next step for the AM and SLM is to replace traditional manufacturing processes. In order to do so, it is important to study the productivity of SLM and in particular its parameters, which controls the productivity rate of the manufacturing operations. As of this moment, the productivity rates for SLM are nowhere near to that of the traditional manufacturing methods. The hope of this thesis is to study the parameters of SLM and the various aspects and introspect parameters and optimize them in order to maximum best outputs. The thesis also tries to understand the relationship between the parameters, productivity and mechanical characteristics. The cohesion between these three variables will yield the best results in future. In today’s day and age, when the technology is growing very rapidly, one of the main concerns in the industry is that of production. Production is a very key aspect when it comes to manufacturing as it directly correlates to the economics of the industry. It becomes an even bigger factor when we consider AM. AM offers newer technologies in terms of design freedom, complexity etc. Although this comes at a cost i.e., AM processes are expensive when compared to the traditional subtractive manufacturing because they are not useful when it comes to mass production and only cost effective for prototyping and small batches. The study reviews (SLM) and the different process parameters that can be changed in order the increase the production rates. In the first section of this thesis, the discussion revolves around AM and its advantages. The next section covers different types of AM processes. The following section indicates the research done so far by different authors in this field is discussed. The discussion will mainly revolve around the type of process and the parameters that were selected correlates how the parameters affect the production rates and what were the conclusions presented. After that, the experimental setup is described mainly relating to relative densities, surface roughness measurements and correlations are inferred with respect to different process parameters. The final goal will be to be see if a set of parameters can be manipulated during the manufacturing process and see if these changes led to any change in production rates.