Fabrication of Functionally Graded Materials Between P21 Tool Steel and Cu by Using Laser-Aided Layered Manufacturing

With the development of layered manufacturing, thermally conductive molds or molds embedding conformal cooling channels can be directly fabricated. Although P21 tool steel is widely used as a mold material because of its dimensional stability, it is not efficient for cooling molds owing to its low thermal conductivity. Hence, the use of functionally graded materials (FGMs) between P21 and Cu may circumvent a tradeoff between the strength and the heat transfer rate. As a preliminary study for the layered manufacturing of thermally conductive molds having FGM structures, one-dimensional P21-Cu FGMs were fabricated by using laser-aided direct metal tooling (DMT), and then, material properties such as the thermal conductivity and specific heat that are related to the heat transfer were measured and analyzed.