INVESTIGATIONS ON THE LUBRICATED WEAR OF DIRECT METAL LASER SINTERED COMPONENTS FOR FUNCTIONAL APPLICATIONS

Abstract

ABSTRACT Direct Metal Laser Sintering(DMLS) is a sequential layered manufacturing method to produce any desired three dimensional parts with simple or complex shapes with no or minimum post-processing. In this study Bronze-Nickel powder was used to make the samples. The samples were produced with the optimized set of parameters such as sintering speed, scan spacing, hatch type, hatch distance and infiltration based on previous studies. To investigate the tribological behavior of the sintered components for functional applications, reciprocating wear tests under lubricated condition were carried out. A ball-on-flat configuration was chosen for the tests. Using Design of Experiments, Taguchi's modified L9 orthogonal Table has been implemented to carry out the experiments. Hardness, load and temperature were the three parameters considered and three levels were chosen for each to create the orthogonal array. Wear tests were carried out with the set parameters and wear rates of the DMLS samples were found out. ANOVA statistical method was used to find the influence of major parameter and the contribution of each parameter on the wear rate of the samples. It has been found that the applied load, one of the selected test parameters had more influence on lubricated wear as compared to other parameters. Keywords: lubricated wear, DMLS, ANOVA, Taguchi. INTRODUCTION Over the years, rapid prototyping (RP) have become popular in new product design and development. Increased concern for the process cost and cycle time, rapid prototyping technology helps in reducing the product development cycle time For most of the functional products, failure due to wear is considered as a complex one. Abrasive wear mechanism is known to be the prevailing cause of wear in reciprocating components. Coating is suggested to improve hardness and wear resistance of RP component