Experimental investigation on machinability of DMLS Ti6Al4V under dry drilling process

ABSTRACT

Additive Manufacturing (AM) technology is being extensively utilized in many industries concerning its superior advantage of easily fabricating the 3D parts possessing relatively high geometrical complicacy. Nevertheless, the AM parts generally need conventional machining, such as drilling, to meet the practical requirements, indicating disparate machinability compared with those manufactured by conventional wrought processes. Hence, to investigate the effects of machining parameters on the drilling characteristics of AM parts is of great significance. This work experimentally studied the machinability of the additive manufactured Ti6Al4V by covering a variety of topics including the cutting forces, temperatures, machined surface roughness, tool wear modes and chip morphology with selected cutting speeds and feed rates under dry drilling process. The material utilized in experiments is the Ti6Al4V manufactured by Direct Metal Laser Sintering (DMLS) technology. The experimental results highlight the parametric influence on the machinability of DMLS Ti6Al4V and present the possibility to validly redesign the machining parameters accordingly.

KEYWORDS:

• AM
• DMLS
• Ti6Al4V
• drilling
• microstructure
• force
• temperature
• wear
• chip
• machinability

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the Important National Science & Technology Specific Projects (Grant No. 2015ZX04002102) for the support of this work.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Important National Science & Technology Specific Projects [2015ZX04002102].