Direct energy deposition applied to soft magnetic material additive manufacturing

Laser-based additive manufacturing (AM) is an emerging fast prototyping technology with the feature of a rapid cooling process, which is key to obtaining unique microstructures. It is possible to improve the performance and reduce the cost of magnetic products by applying Laser-based AM because their microstructure plays a significant role. Direct energy deposition (DED) for soft magnetic material is a promising method. This research verifies the feasibility of the idea. It designs and optimizes the printing parameters and processes by quality control experiments inspired by the Taguchi method and analysis of variance models to obtain printed soft magnetic materials with few defects and cracks. Moreover, it presents the properties of DED-printed silicon iron samples by conducting optical and scanning electron microscopy and magnetic characterization.