| Abstract Scope |
Electron Beam Powder Bed Fusion (E-PBF) is an advanced additive manufacturing (AM) process that employs a high-energy electron beam to fuse metal powder into solid parts. Traditional line melting, while being employed in other laser-based AM methods, encounters challenges such as thermal constraints, limited microstructural control, and dimensional distortion. Leveraging the electron beam’s deflection speed of up to 4 km/s, spot melting in E-PBF is proposed as a solution, offering precise thermal profile control, improved microstructural control, elimination of lateral distortion, and less geometry dependency. This unique melting technique, coupled with an open-source programmable E-PBF system, opens a new regime in additive manufacturing that remains largely unexplored. Here, the authors successfully showed this potential by using different spot melting strategies to fabricate titanium Ti-6Al-4V alloy. |