Investigation of Laser Polishing on the Surface of the Parts Produced Using Powder Bed Fusion

Abstract

Additive manufacturing (AM) offers high design flexibilities and challenging approaches to produce highly complicated and intricate parts, which could not be possible to be produced with traditional manufacturing methods. However, one of the significant drawbacks of AM processes is, certainly, poor surface qualities, which are not acceptable for end products. Laser polishing (LP) offers an innovative surface-finishing technique that could be used to reduce the surface roughness. This research presents the fundamentals of the LP process, experiments on the additive manufactured part surfaces and the roughness reduction. An INCONEL 625 part produced by selective laser melting (SLM) was selected as the sample for the LP experiments. The results showed that laser polishing is able to enhance the surface finish and the reduction in surface roughness can become from Ra = 10.91 µm to Ra = 2.347 µm.  

Keywords

• Additive manufacturing
• Laser polishing
• Surface roughness reduction

References

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