Aluminium Matrix Composites (Amcs) By Dmls

Many materials have been processed successfully and many reports are available in literature on the Direct Metal Laser Sintering (DMLS) of iron, steels, superalloys, Ti andAl alloys. Recently, also processing of composite materials has attracted interest due to the potential of the process in freeform fabrication of intricate articles in a reduced production cycle. In this paper are summarized the main results for the fabrication of AlSiMg/SiC and AlSiMg/MgAl2O4 composites by DMLS. The starting metal and ceramic powders have been simply mixed using a ball milling system. Then processing has been carried out in an Ar atmosphere using different laser energies at different scanning speeds to fabricate geometric regular samples with densities near to the theoretical ones. The resulting composites have been investigated in terms of microstructure by XRD and by optical microscopy, and in terms of hardness.