Influence of as-built surface and heat treatment on the fatigue resistance of Additively Layer Manufacturing (ALM) AlSi10Mg alloy

This work concerns the fatigue resistance of a AlSi10Mg material produced by additive manufacturing, and more precisely the competition between as built manufacturing surface and as-machined surface on the fatigue resistance. Samples were built by a powder-bed process with an EOS-M280 machine using standard in two configurations (0 degrees and 90 degrees) in order to evaluate the impact of building direction on fatigue life. The impact of as-built surface on fatigue behavior is quantified for each specimen configuration. A T6 heat treatment is performed on samples in order to evaluate the impact of microstructure on fatigue behavior. For each configurations, the S-N curves is determined in as-built and T6 materials with a load ratio R= -1. The fracture surfaces are carefully analyzed in order to determine the critical defect size for each sample. A Kitagawa type diagram representing the fatigue limit as a function of the defect size is derived from these measurements. All the results were compared to those obtained in asmachined samples.