Mechanical Engineering Commons^™

Explosive Compaction Of Additively Manufactured Material, Phillip R. Mulligan, Cody Lough, Douglas A. Bristow, Edward Kinzel, Catherine E. Johnson

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Selective Laser Melting (SLM) is an additive manufacturing (AM) technique that uses a laser to locally fuse material in a metal-powder bed. The process is performed in layers enabling significant geometric freedom over traditional manufacturing techniques. During the deposition process, the metal is locally melted and rapidly self-quenched, leading to rapid solidification with well-defined melt-pool boundaries. Analogies are often drawn to the microstructure created in welding, albeit extending to the entire part. The SLM process parameters are optimized to produce near full density metal parts. The process parameters can also be adjusted to produce local regions that are of unmelted …