Additive manufacturing (AM) is currently the most sought-after production process for any complex shaped geometries commonly encountered in Aerospace Industries. Although, several technologies of AM do exits, the most popular one is the Direct Metal Laser Sintering (DMLS) owing to its high versatility in terms of precision of geometries of components and guarantee of highest levels of reduction in production time. Further, metallic component of any complex shape such as Gas Turbine Blades can also be developed by this technique.
In the light of the above, the present work focuses on development of iron silicon carbide (Fe-SiC) complex part for ball screw assembly using DMLS technique. The optimized process parameters, hardness and wear resistance of the developed iron-SiC composite will be reported.
Further, since the material chosen is a metallic composite one, the effect of SiC on the thermal stresses generated during the DMLS processing of Fe-SiC composite will also be discussed. A novel approach to testing of wear resistance of the developed component will also be presented in this paper.
The developed composite component exhibited lesser wear scars even after 1-lakh cycles of operation indicating excellent wear resistance. It is also observed that increased content of SiC in the developed composite results in higher extent of thermal stresses.