Search

International audience; One major hindrance that alloy design for additive manufacturing (AM) faces nowadays is hot tearing. Contrary to the previous works which either try to reduce solidification range or introduce grain refinement, the current work presents a new approach of employing segregation engineering to alter the residual stress states at the interdendritic and grain boundary regions and consequently prevent hot tearing. Here, in situ Al alloying is introduced into an existing hot-cracking susceptible high-entropy alloy CoCrFeNi. It is found that within a certain range of compositions, such as Al0.5CoCrFeNi, the hot crack density was drastically decreased. During the solidification of this specific alloy composition, Al is firstly ejected from the primary dendritic face-centred cubic (FCC) phase and segregates into the interdendritic regions. Spinodal decomposition then occurs in these Al-enriched regions to form the ordered B2 NiAl and disordered body-centred cubic (BCC) Cr phases. Due to the higher molar volume and lower homologous temperatures of these B2/BCC phases, the inherent residual strain is accommodated and transformed from a maximum 0.006 tensile strain in CoCrFeNi to a compressive strain of ~0.001 in Al0.5CoCrFeNi. It is believed that this grain boundary segregation engineering method could provide a new pathway to systematically counteract the hot tearing problem in additive manufacturing of metals and alloys, using available thermodynamic and kinetic database information.

Electron beam melting (EBM®)-built Ti–6Al–4V has increasingly shown great potential for orthopedic implant and aerospace applications in recent years. The microstructure and mechanical properties of EBM-built Ti–6Al–4V have been systematically investigated in this work. Its microstructure consists of columnar prior β grains delineated by wavy grain boundary α and transformed α/β structures with both cellular colony and basket-weave morphology as well as numerous singular α bulges within the prior β grains. The β phase is found to form as discrete flat rods embedded in continuous α phase and its volume fraction is determined to be ∼3.6%. Moreover, α′ martensite was not observed as it has decomposed into α and β phases. In particular, the α/β interface was studied in detail combined transmission electron microscopy with atom probe tomography. Of note is that graded Ti–6Al–4V microstructure i.e. both prior β grain width and β phase interspacing continuously increase with the build height, was observed, which mainly arises from the decreasing cooling rate. Furthermore, an increasingly pronounced strain hardening effect was also observed as the previously built layers undergo a longer annealing compared to the subsequent layers. As a result, graded mechanical properties of Ti–6Al–4V with degraded microhardness and tensile properties were found. A good agreement with the Hall–Petch relation indicates that the graded property takes place mainly due to the graded microstructure. In addition, this graded microstructure and mechanical properties were discussed based on a quantitative characterization.