Mon, 20 January, 2020
"Attending ESIAM19 was a great opportunity for me to get feedback about my work, find out what’s new in the same or similar field as my research and also network with other academic and industrial experts.’’
Dibakor Boruah
NSIRC PhD students Dibakor Boruah and Gowtham Soundarapandiyan presented their work at the First European Conference on Structural Integrity of Additively Manufactured Materials (ESIAM19) held in Trondheim, Norway.
ESIAM19 was the opening event for a yearly international conference series held on alternate years in Europe and worldwide, which provided an overview of current scientific knowledge and stimulated ideas for future research directions in this emerging field.
Dibakor Boruah presented his work titled: “Effect of Post-Deposition Thermal Treatments on the Microstructure and Mechanical Performance of Cold Sprayed Ti-6Al-4V alloy.”
This work is very relevant to the aerospace industry as titanium alloy Ti-6Al-4V is used in many aircraft components owing to its well-known characteristics such as high strength, excellent fatigue and corrosion resistance, relatively low density, etc.
Dibakor’s work uses the cold spray method to establish a novel experimentation procedure to analyse real case cold spray repair geometries.
His study focuses on the effect of post-deposition thermal treatments and structural integrity assessments under static and dynamic loading, taking account of residual stresses.
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What is Cold Spraying / Cold Spray Coating Deposition?
In Cold Spray, powder particles (typically 10 to 40 µm) are accelerated to very high velocities (200 to 1200 m.s-1) by a supersonic compressed gas jet at temperatures below their melting point.
Upon impact with the substrate, the particles experience extreme and rapid plastic deformation which disrupts the thin surface oxide films that are present on all metals and alloys.
This allows intimate conformal contact between the exposed metal surfaces under high local pressure, permitting bonding to occur and thick layers of deposited material to be built up rapidly. The deposition efficiency is very high, above 90% in some cases (Extract from TWI-Global.com).
Gowtham Soundarapandiyan presented his work titled “Ti6Al4V Powder Recyclability and Effect of Post-Thermal Treatments on Build Properties in Electron Beam-Powder Bed Fusion”.
Titanium powders are one of the most costly materials used in additive manufacturing. Currently, the powder bed fusion process results in a large amount of powder material being left unconsumed.
Therefore, there is a demand for recycling unconsumed powder material. Industry is quite nervous about using this recycled powder, especially for the manufacturing of safety critical parts.
This work focus on improving the process efficiency with recycled powders by addressing industry concerns without compromising the structural integrity of the produced parts.
Following Dibakor’s attendance, he commented, “It has been a great time attending ESIAM19 in terms of imparting knowledge on the state-of-the-art findings in my research area, getting constructive feedback from experts, as well as networking.”
Meanwhile, Gowtham said, "Attending ESIAM19 was a great opportunity for me to get feedback about my work, find out what’s new in the same or similar field as my research and also network with other academic and industrial experts.’’
Gowtham and Dibakor's research is sponsored by Lloyd's Register Foundation, a charitable foundation helping to protect life and property by supporting engineering-related education, public engagement and the application of research. www.lrfoundation.org.uk
Written by Thomas Clover, TWI Copyrighting