Investigation of cylindrical part manufacturing by shaped metal deposition

Additive manufacturing is a new generation of manufacturing technology and recently it has increasing demand in industrial applications. In this production technique; instead of removing the material, the material is added layer by layer in order to get near or net shape of the full geometry. Thus, the final shape of the products can be produced with use of less material and more complex shape of products can be produced easily. In this work, shaped metal deposition (SMD), which is one of the additive manufacturing methods, was used for producing cylindrical parts. For this purpose, an experimental set-up including TIG welding + wire deposition tool was designed and constructed. The aim of this work is to investigate the cylindrical part manufacturing using SMD method and analyse geometrical attributes, macro and microstructure characteristic as well the effects of as process parameters. The geometry of the deposited parts was investigated using a suitable design of experiment. The effects of process parameters on wall height, width, and outer diameter were also investigated. The optimum set of parameters was obtained to produce cylindrical parts as: current (I)=120 A, travel speed (TS)=0.18 m/min and wire feed speed (WFS)=1.9 m/min. Furthermore, the metallographic testing results showed that TS and I values were very effective on microstructure and the changes in the value of WFS had not a significant effect on the microstructure. Vermicular and lathy ferrite morphology were observed on the investigated microstructures because of the cooling effect. For some samples, content of the vermicular ferrite was found more than the others. The macrostructure results showed that there were no errors in the depositions, even on the interface between successive layers. It has been found that the hardness was affected by the amount of heat input to the deposition area.