Heat treatment influence on micromilling of additively manufactured titanium

Abstract

Recently, miniaturized products are being used as working tools by many fields, highlighting the medical and dental industries. With the development of Additive Manufacturing (AM) processes, these features can be produced with less material waste and with wide design possibilities by applying a ‘near-net-shape’ technique. Although, the AM parts require post-processing techniques to reach the required material properties, dimensions, and surface roughness and to reduce undesirable residual stresses. In this aspect, the micromilling process is usually applied to attain the desired dimensions and surface roughness and heat treatments to attain the desired material properties and to reduce residual stress. Nonetheless, the micromilling process can be done before or after the heat treatment. In this perspective, this research analyses the surface roughness results for the micromilled AM parts before and after the heat treatment, which is in important for planning the manufacturing route for these parts. Thus, this work aims to compare the surface roughness results of Sa, Sq, Ssk, Sku when performing the micromilling process on AM parts by Laser Powder Bed Fusion (LPBF), with and without heat treatment. For the experiments, the tool size, feed and cutting speed were varied in a full factorial design of experiments. After that, the surface roughness parameters were analyzed and compared for both workpieces. With the achieved results, it can be concluded that the surface texture (Ssk) for the heat-treated and non-heat-treated samples present a predominance of peaks. Also, there is a presence of inordinately high peaks and/or deep valleys on the surface (Sku), which can present an interference of the chips left on the surface not removed by the ultrasonic cleaning. By the analyses of the arithmetic mean deviation (Sa) and the root mean square height (Sq), a better surface quality was achieved when micromilling the samples before the heat treatment for greater tool size, for the specific set of parameters used. With the smaller tool size, a greater surface roughness was achieved if compared to the bigger tool size, though the difference between the samples were not expressive. Moreover, the results achieved in this work can be applied to improve the surface quality of the AM parts used in industry.