Study, development and characterization of aluminum based materials by additive manufacturing

This PhD thesis work was pursued in a context of investigation and development of different kind of materials by DMLS, in particular aluminum alloys. Among these, AlSi10Mg0.3 casting alloy was investigated and characterized from both mechanical and microstructural (through optical and electron microscopy) point of view. It was previously fundamental to study the process parameters (in particular scan speed, laser power and hatching distance) in order to obtain samples with density near to the theoretical one for the different characterizations. In addition, processing of composite materials has attracted interest due to the potential of the process in freeform fabrication of intricate articles in a reduced supply chain. For this reason, the studied alloy was used as a matrix to fabricate two different “ex-situ" Aluminun Matrix Composites (AMCs): starting from AlSi10Mg powders and mixing them with submicrometric SiC and nanometric MgAl2O4 . It was fundamental to investigate the effect of the main process parameters to obtain composites with the highest density, to be then characterized.