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Comment by naasking | Hacker News Reader

Is there a known source of internal flaws/porosity in an otherwise solid part? Presumably laser melting produces a puddle which shouldn't allow for internal pores, as long as it isn't printed too fast (or solidifies too fast, which is why I think most chambers are internally heated to near melting temp).

Re: surface roughness, I can understand that the powder grain size creates a sort of minimal structure size, and can in principle be the start of a crack if a surface grain gets knocked loose. Is that the sort of thing you mean? I can see that for any internal or external surfaces, and a rocket engine combustion is certainly applying a lot of heat and pressure on surface grains. Can this be alleviated by smaller grain sizes, or is there some limit there?

Re: repeated heating/cooling and internal stresses, this strikes me as just requiring standard post-printing stages like tempering to alleviate internal stresses.

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I can't speak to the proximal cause of the roughness and porosity, but if you've ever held a raw printed aluminum part in your hand it is immediately apparent. That said there are processes to deal with porosity like Hot Isostatic Pressure (HIP) treatment that basically crushes all the voids with immense pressure. This does come at the cost of dimensional accuracy though (HIP will compress the part somewhat).

Similarly, annealing a 3D-print to relieve residual stress does work, but it also will cause warping as those stresses are relieved. Again, sacrificing dimensional accuracy. Frontier AM companies have ways to compensate for all of these effects but it's a trial and error process for each part essentially.

At this point you're now stacking multiple processes on each other just to try to get to near-billet properties. Calibration Trials > Print > HIP > Anneal > Machine. The cost adds up quickly. It can be justified especially in non-fatigue-critical applications but it's no free lunch

I'm not sure if it make sense but... is it possible to put the printer inside a vacuum chamber so there is no air to fill the internal bubbles?

Cooling would be an interesting problem. Atmosphere takes away the heat pretty readily.

You could have a cooling plate the work is on. But the higher temperature difference is apt to cause warping.

Vacuum filled pores would also be an issue.

I expect them to collapse due to surface tension or something.

[Slightly related https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cavitation The problem is that the bubbles are filled with vapor instead of CO2 like in sparkling water.]

SLS printers lay a layer height worth of powdered metal and fuse it with a laser engraver. Thee bed lowers one layer and the process is repeated. They don't bring materials used like inconel to full melting temperature, only do what it takes for the metal sand to clump together. That's one source of pores.

I assume you can just anneal or print then recast in sand or whatever, maybe even lostwax with Al as wax, but the point is that porosity in a print itself is inevitable with current powder based tech.

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