METALLOGRAPHIC CHARACTERIZATION OF POROUS LOW-ALLOY STEEL SAMPLES MANUFACTURED USING BOTH PRESS-AND-SINTER AND ADDITIVE MANUFACTURING TECHNIQUES

摘要

Designing powder metallurgy (PM) parts and the production sequence used to make them requires the creation of prototype parts intended to validate their design, the materials used, and their performance through laboratory and field testing. During the initial stages of prototype part manufacture, compaction tooling (dies and punches) must often be made to produce parts for initial testing of the PM part design. This can be both expensive and time consuming. To avoid these cost and time issues, additive manufacturing methods can be used to make the pre-PM process parts, thus bypassing the need for pre-production die and tool sets. Another benefit of the additive manufactu-irng (AM) process is sometimes the speed with which the prototype parts can be made compared with developing and implementing the specific PM process. In addition, the ability to produce size and shape details accurately may help to minimize the secondary machining operations required for the PM parts, which may also shorten the qualification time from prototype to manufacturing.