Study of selective laser melting process parameters to improve the obtainable roughness of AlSi10Mg parts

Selective Laser Melting of AlSi10Mg parts has a lot of applications in different fields such as aerospace and automotive for its abilities to fabricate components characterized by complex shapes, good mechanical properties and low porosity. One of the main drawbacks for its application is the obtainable surface roughness widely not suitable for functional requirements. Typically, the improvement is handled by secondary operations thus markedly increasing the production time and costs. In this paper the possibility to improve the surface roughness by tuning Selective Laser Melting process parameters is investigated. A design of experiments is carried out considering not only the common laser process parameters but also the changing of the contour, upskin and downskin strategy definitions. This way the attained results show a marked decreasing of the roughness for vertical and horizontal surfaces.