Printing functional metallic 3D parts using a hybrid friction-surfacing additive manufacturing process

This paper presents a hybrid additive manufacturing (AM) process combining multilayer friction surfacing (FS) and metal machining operations. While friction surfacing has been known as a part repair or coating process, we here present an attempt to use it to build whole 3D metallic parts. The feasibility of the process is tested using heat-treatable Aluminum alloy AA6061 rod on a mild steel substrate. A series of FS experiments was conducted with the purpose to identify suitable process settings. This included different combinations of rotational and travel speeds of the FS rod. Quality of deposited layers was assessed using different indicators including bond width, layer uniformity, layer thickness, and others. ANOVA was conducted to reveal the effects of process parameter settings on the quality metrics. Two metallic parts were printed successfully, which demonstrates the feasibility of the proposed hybrid process.