Enhancing powder bed fusion of alumina ceramic material: a comprehensive study from powder tailoring to mechanical performance evaluation

Abstract Powder bed fusion (PBF) is an additive manufacturing (AM) technique that holds a great promise for alumina ceramic materials to be processed in a one step. To ensure an effective outcome, the powder material should be thoroughly tailored, and the process parameters should be appropriately investigated. These process parameters include laser power, scanning speed, hatching space, and scanning strategies. The alumina powder has been tailored and modified to be appropriately used for PBF using the spray-drying technique, and the process parameters have been predicted and selected using a developed numerical model. Different scanning speeds of 100, 200, 300, and 400 mm/s have been considered, and the other parameters have been numerically predicted. The results demonstrated that spray drying is an effective technique for tailoring the characteristics of alumina powder, such as particle shape, particle size distribution, flowability, and absorptivity, making it ideally suited for PBF processing. Furthermore, the developed numerical model demonstrated outstanding reliability in predicting the most effective laser power and hatching space for different scanning speeds, resulting in significant cost and time savings when compared to relying solely on experimental trials. Employing a scanning speed of 400 mm/s yielded a significant improvement in relative density and quality of the printed samples surpassing other scanning speeds. Moreover, this speed effectively addressed various challenges encountered by other scanning speeds. Following the optimization of process parameters, it was determined that a relative density of 94.5% could be achieved by utilizing a scanning speed of 400 mm/s, a laser power of 210 W, and a hatching space of 30 µm. However, the evaluation of mechanical performance revealed that while the microhardness of the printed alumina samples matched the values reported in the literature, the attained compressive strength fell significantly below the values reported in the literature.