Selective laser melting of Cu-inconel 718 powder mixtures

The se­lec­tive laser melt­ing of me­chan­i­cally mixed In­conel 718 and cop­per pow­ders is stud­ied by pro­cess­ing feed­stocks of dif­fer­ent Cu con­tent at var­i­ous en­ergy in­puts. It was ob­served that with the in­crease of the Cu con­tent the width of the molten pools de­creases while the poros­ity of the sam­ples in­creases. Lower val­ues of en­ergy in­put en­hance the ef­fects brought about by the ad­di­tion of Cu. De­creas­ing the Cu weight frac­tion or, in­versely, in­creas­ing the en­ergy in­put, the ten­sile and yield strengths pro­gres­sively in­crease due both to the re­duced con­tent of the softer com­po­nent, such as the Cu pow­der, and to the de­crease in poros­ity. Be­cause of the poros­ity in­crease, the de­crease in hard­ness and in­crease in ther­mal con­duc­tiv­ity, reg­is­tered on in­cre­ment­ing the cop­per con­tent in the feed­stock, are, re­spec­tively, greater and lower than ex­pected. The ob­tained re­sults show the pos­si­bil­ity of man­u­fac­tur­ing dense part by SLM us­ing Cu-In­conel 718 mixed pow­ders.