from the conferences organized by TANGER Ltd.
Presented paper compares fatigue behaviour of alloy AlSi9Cu3 produced by gravity casting and Selective Laser Melting (SLM). SLM is one of the additive manufacturing methods. It allows a production of metal parts with complicated shape in relatively short time and without big material waste. However the quality of final material could be worse than conventionally produced one (e.g. moulded or extruded).Acoustic emission (AE) method is used to obtain detailed informations about fatigue behaviour. Compared to previous work, the new methods of AE signal analysis is used. This method provides a more detailed AE signal analysis, in addition to number of count and events, also takes into account rise time and amplitude of the events. So we do not get only a ratio of fatigue stages but also an idea of microstructure changes during cyclical loading.Main aims of presented study are to compare endurance limit of cast and SLM aluminum alloy using standard S-N curves and analyse the fatigue processes using AE method. Both materials were tested in as-cast resp. as-built condition without any heat treatment. All samples were subjected to fatigue bending tests in high-cycle regime. Result shows that the endurance limit of the SLM material is better than the cast material with a similar chemical composition. AE signal analysis shows different ratio of fatigue stages and indicate a different mechanism of crack initiation and grow.
Keywords: Acoustic emission, fatigue, selective laser melting, aluminium alloy© This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.