Horizontal dimensional accuracy prediction of selective laser melting

Abstract A theoretical model has been proposed to predict the horizontal dimensional accuracy of selective laser melting (SLM) in this paper. It is found that the horizontal dimensional deviation of SLM consists of two parts. The first part is related to the mode of track filling and the track width. The effect of heat accumulation on track width is also taken into account in this model. The second part is the solidification shrinkage which is dominated by the temperature history of the tracks of a layer when the material and dimension size are fixed. Then, the SLMed Ti6Al4V parts fabricated to verify this theoretical model has been performed in this paper too. The results show that the predicted and experimental results has a good correspondence. At last, less than 20μm dimension deviation of SLMed thin-wall samples was achieved by pre-compensation using this theoretical model.