Improvement of Fatigue Strength in Additively Manufactured Aluminum Alloy AlSi10Mg via Submerged Laser Peening

As the fatigue properties of as-built components of additively manufactured (AM) metals are considerably weaker than those of wrought metals because of their rougher surface, post-processing is necessary to improve the fatigue properties. To demonstrate the improvement in the fatigue properties of AM metals via post-processing methods, the fabrication of AlSi10Mg, i.e., PBF–LS/AlSi10Mg, through powder bed fusion (PBF) using laser sintering (LS) and its treatment via submerged laser peening (SLP), using a fiber laser and/or a Nd/YAG laser, was evaluated via plane bending fatigue tests. In SLP, laser ablation (LA) is generated by a pulsed laser and a bubble is generated after LA, which behaves like a cavitation bubble that is referred to as “laser cavitation (LC)”. In this paper, LA-dominated SLP is referred to as “laser treatment (LT)”, while LC collapse-dominated SLP is referred to as “laser cavitation peening (LCP)”, as the impact of LC collapse is used for peening. It was revealed that SLP using a fiber laser corresponded with LT rather than LCP. It was demonstrated that the fatigue strength at N = 107 was 85 MPa for LCP and 103 MPa for the combined process of blasting (B) + LT + LCP, whereas the fatigue strength of the as-built specimen was 54 MPa.