Journal
MICROMACHINES
Volume 14, Issue 7, Pages -Publisher
MDPI
DOI: 10.3390/mi14071436
Keywords
3D printing; laser powder bed fusion; NiTi alloy; energy density; TPMS lattice; robotic cannula; mechanical testing
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The study focuses on producing a robotic cannula tip with NiTi material, optimizing process parameters and testing samples to determine the optimal energy density for LPBF manufacturing of intricate NiTi components.
Additive manufacturing (AM) was recently developed for building intricate devices in many fields. Especially for laser powder bed fusion (LPBF), its high-precision manufacturing capability and adjustable process parameters are involved in tailoring the performance of functional components. NiTi is well-known as smart material utilized widely in biomedical fields thanks to its unique superelastic and shape-memory performance. However, the properties of NiTi are extremely sensitive to material microstructure, which is mainly determined by process parameters in LPBF. In this work, we choose a unique NiTi intricate component: a robotic cannula tip, in which material superelasticity is a crucial requirement as the optimal object. First, the process window was confirmed by printing thin walls and bulk structures. Then, for optimizing parameters precisely, a Gyroid-type sheet triply periodic minimal-surface (G-TPMS) structure was proposed as the standard test sample. Finally, we verified that when the wall thickness of the G-TPMS structure is smaller than 130 & mu;m, the optimal energy density changes from 167 J/m3 to 140 J/m3 owing to the lower cooling rate of thinner walls. To sum up, this work puts forward a novel process optimization methodology and provides the processing guidelines for intricate NiTi components by LPBF.
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