Method of Additive Manufacturing of Metal Products

Abstract

The article describes modern methods of additive manufacturing of metal products, their advantages and disadvantages are considered, the relevance of developing the most productive and effective method of additive manufacturing of metal products based on layered electric arc surfacing is substantiated. The known methods of additive manufacturing are based, as a rule, on the principle of melting additive powder material by highly concentrated laser or electronic sources of thermal action. These methods of layer-by-layer deposition have gained their relevance due to low prevalence of thermal influence zone in the deposited metal, high accuracy of layer-by-layer construction and possibility of automated control for the additive manufacturing process. Despite many advantages of these methods, there are significant disadvantages that limit their use in real production processes. These include low speed of layer-by-layer construction due to the small size of the deposited layer and the need to perform several passes to form a wall with a given thickness, the high cost of the equipment used, the need to use a vacuum chamber during the surfacing process, as well as the high probability of defects in the structure of the deposited metal during sintering of powder materials. In the proposed additive manufacturing method, these disadvantages are eliminated by using an electric arc discharge to melt the filler material wire. The use of an electric arc in combination with wire material allows increasing the speed of layered construction up to 4 times. Also, the deposition of wire material minimizes the probability of non-melts and pores in the structure of the deposited metal. However, in order to improve the quality of surfaced products and use the proposed method in real production conditions, it is necessary to provide automated control of the technological process of layered electric arc surfacing. For this purpose, the article identifies the key stages of the technological process and highlights the most significant characteristics that determine the quality of the deposited products.