Fabricating CoCrFeMnNi high entropy alloy via selective laser melting in-situ alloying

Abstract Quasi-equiatomic CoCrFeMnNi high entropy alloy (HEA) has been in-situ alloyed by selective laser melting (SLM) from a blend of CoCrFeNi pre-alloyed powder and Mn elemental powder. The blended powder shows good printability with various SLM parameters and the as-built HEA samples achieve a reliable forming quality. Despite the slight evaporation of Mn, energy dispersive spectrometer mapping and X-ray diffraction results show that the as-built HEA has a homogeneous chemical distribution and presents a single face-centred-cubic (fcc) phase, indicating successful in-situ alloying. The study has verified the feasibility of using blended powder to prepare high-quality HEA by SLM.