Measuring and predicting the thermal properties of powder beds for electron beam additive manufacturing
摘要
A combination of experiments and simulations have been used to characterise the thermal diffusivity of Ti–6Al–4V powders used in powder bed electron beam additive manufacturing. Using controlled ex-situ sintering, it was possible to measure both thermal diffusivities (via laser flash analysis) and powder bed structure (via X-ray microtomography). No simple correlation between the thermal diffusivity and average neck-to-particle size ratio was found but the results (experiments and simulations) point to the importance of other characteristics of the powder bed such as the number of necks per particle.