Sugino Corporation

Sugino AM Metals Internal Finishing Development

Laser Powder Bed Fusion (LPBF) is a relatively new method to produce additive manufactured metal parts in shapes that were not possible with traditional subtracted methods such as machining of wrought products. The ability to produce shapes that include hollow internal shapes, holes and long circuitous passageways could be advantageous to industry but is limited because of the internal contamination and rough surfaces created. This student team will explore Sugino's Cavitation Abrasive Surface Finishing (CASF) as a means of smoothing and finishing these types of features in titanium LPBF test parts. The student team will design and build titanium AM test parts using LPBF with input from Sugino Co. engineers. The parts will be devised in ways that will assist in the furthering of the CASF technology capabilities for finishing internal holes, passageways, bore holes, cavities and long circuitous features. The surface finish that is achieved will be characterized before and after CASF processing to analyze changes in surface texture & roughness, macro surface imagery, SEM surface imagery, fatigue Kt factor analysis and other methods such as X-ray diffraction measurements. An iterative approach will be used to incrementally improve the capabilities of CASF for meeting the needs to industries such as aerospace, automotive, bio-engineering and general hardware mfg. This student team will work towards a baseline understanding of the CASF capabilities to smooth and make improvements to the surfaces of AM LPBF titanium parts will be established using test parts, data and reports from previous efforts, along with comparisons to other alternative methods via a comprehensive literature search. The student team will develop and execute a test program to build and test additional AM LPBF titanium parts in order to make improvements to the CASF method. The student team will summarize data in bi-weekly reports and write and present a final report to Sugino. Data may be presented at conferences, Journal papers or by other means in order to disseminate the CASF capabilities with the technical community.