Microstructure, texture and mechanical property evolution during additive manufacturing of Ti6Al4V alloy for aerospace applications

Additive Manufacturing (AM) is an innovative manufacturing process which offers near-net shape fabrication of complex components, directly from CAD models, without dies or substantial machining, resulting in a reduction in lead-time, waste, and cost. For example, the buy-to-fly ratio for a titanium component machined from forged billet is typically 10-20:1 compared to 5-7:1 when manufactured by AM. However, the production rates for most AM processes are relatively slow and AM is consequently largely of interest to the aerospace, automotive and biomedical industries. In addition, the solidification conditions in AM with the Ti alloy commonly lead to undesirable coarse columnar primary ? grain structures in components. The present research is focused on developing a fundamental understanding of the influence of the processing conditions on microstructure and texture evolution and their resulting effect on the mechanical properties during additive manufacturing with a Ti6Al4V alloy, using three different techniques, namely; 1) Selective laser melting (SLM) process, 2) Electron beam selective melting (EBSM) process and, 3) Wire arc additive manufacturing (WAAM) process. The most important finding in this work was that all the AM processes produced columnar ? -grain structures which grow by epitaxial re-growth up through each melted layer. By thermal modelling using TS4D (Thermal Simulation in 4 Dimensions), it has been shown that the melt pool size increased and the cooling rate decreased from SLM to EBSM and to the WAAM process. The prior ? grain size also increased with melt pool size from a finer size in the SLM to a moderate size in EBSM and to huge grains in WAAM that can be seen by eye. However, despite the large difference in power density between the processes, they all had similar G/R (thermal gradient/growth rate) ratios, which were predicted to lie in the columnar growth region in the solidification diagram. The EBSM process showed a pronounced local heterogeneity in the microstructure in local transition areas, when there was a change in geometry; for e.g. change in wall thickness, thin to thick capping section, cross-over? s, V-transitions, etc. By reconstruction of the high temperature ? microstructure, it has been shown that all the AM platforms showed primary columnar ? grains with a ? || Nz fibre texture with decreased texture strength from the WAAM to the EBSM and SLM processes. Due to a lack of variant selection, the room temperature ? -phase showed a weaker transformation ? -texture compared to the primary ? -texture with decreased texture strength in line with the reduction in ? -texture strength.The large ? grains observed in the WAAM process were not significantly affected by changes in the GTAW (Gas Tungsten Arc Welding) process parameters, such as travel speed, peak to base current ratio, pulse frequency, etc. However, an increased wire feed rate significantly improved the grain size. Another important finding from this work was that by combining deformation and AM the grain size was reduced to a greater extent than could be achieved by varying the arc or, heat source parameters. It has been shown that the large columnar ? -grain structure usually seen in the WAAM process, with a size of 20 mm in length and 2 mm in width, was refined down to ~ 150 �m by the application of a modest deformation, between each layer deposited. The EBSM process showed consistent average static tensile properties in all build directions and met the minimum specification required by ISO 5832-3 (for the wrought and annealed Ti6Al4V). The WAAM samples produced using more effective shielding and the standard pulsed GTAW system also showed average static properties that met the minimum specification required by AMS 4985C for investment casting and hipped Ti6Al4V alloy. Overall, the fatigue life of the samples that were produced by AM was very good and showed a better fatigue performance than the MMPDS design data for castings. However, there was a large scatter in the fatigue life due to the effect of pores.