Fatigue Behavior of Additive Manufactured Parts in Different Process Chains - An Experimental Study

Metal based Additive Manufacturing (AM) has experienced dynamic growth in recent years. However, the global distribution of Additive Manufacturing is limited by the fact the produced parts suffer from bad surface quality and the material properties concerning fatigue life are still an object of current investigations which limits possible applications of AM parts. Due to this fact metal AM processes are often followed by a post process to ensure a better surface quality. In this paper the authors present results where fatigue life and different post processes of additive manufactured parts are investigated. Subsequently, surface roughness, high cycle fatigue, fracture behavior and microstructure have been characterized. Finally the results for the different post processing states have been compared and surface properties as well as microstructure have been correlated with the fatigue properties in order to evaluate how different process chains influence the High cycle fatigue (HCF) behavior of additive manufactured parts.