Study the effect of heat treatment on the relative density of SLM built parts of alsi10mg alloy

Selective laser melting (SLM) is a powder bed fusion (PBF) method that employs high-intensity laser as energy source to melt the powder layer by layer in accordance with the computer-aided design data. The casting aluminum alloy AlSi10Mg is mostly applied in the automotive and aerospace industry due to its good physical and mechanical characteristics. The goal of the paper is to study the effect of heat treatment i.e. solution heat treatment and artificial aging on the relative density of SLM built samples of the AlSi10Mg alloy. Design of experiments (DoE) approach was applied for the fabrication of test samples. The influence of different process parameters and heat treatment on the relative density was observed and resulted that maximum densification of more than 99 % is achieved by the heat treatments and at optimal parameters of 320 W laser power, 900 mm/sec scanning speed and 25 % of overlap rate.