Influence of Effective Laser Energy on the Structure and Mechanical Properties of Laser Melting Deposited Ti6Al4V Alloy

The laser energy density (E-D) is often utilized in many additive manufacturing (AM) processes studies to help researchers to further investigate the process-structure-property correlations of Ti6Al4V alloys. However, the reliability of the E-D is still questionable. In this work, a specific empirical calculation equation of the effective laser energy (E-e), which is a dimensionless parameter in laser melting deposition (LMD) processing, was proposed based on the molten pool temperature. The linear regression results and the coefficient of determination prove the feasibility of the E-e equation, which indicates that E-e can more accurately reflect the energy-temperature correlations than the commonly used laser energy density (E-D) equation. Additionally, Ti6Al4V components were fabricated by the LMD process with different E-e to investigate the influence of E-e on their structure and mechanical properties. Experimental results show that the detrimental columnar prior beta meso-structure can be circumvented and the uniform alpha + beta laths micro-structure can be obtained in LMD Ti6Al4V by a judicious combination of the process parameter (P = 2000 W, V = 12 mm/s, and F = 10.5 g/min) and E-e (7.98 x 10(5)) with excellent tensile strength (1006 +/- 25 MPa) and elongation (14.9 +/- 0.6%). Overall, the present work provides an empirical calculation equation to obtain a clearer understanding of the influence of different process parameters and indicates the possibility to fabricate the Ti6Al4V alloy with excellent mechanical properties by parameter optimization in the LMD process.