Study on Fabrication of Grinding Wheel in Selective Laser Melting

Selective laser melting (SLM) is a promising technique to build grinding wheels with complex structures. In this paper, Ni-based self-fluxing alloys are chosen as bond materials to investigate single track formation on a steel substrate under different processing parameters. Results show that irregular and balling tracks are obtained with a low linear energy density (LED). The width of a melt pool increases linearly with LED. For LED values larger than around 0.9 J/mm, keyhole occurs in the melt pool, which is not desirable in the SLM process. Energy dispersive spectroscopy (EDS) mapping is performed to investigate the formation of the melt pool. Through an analysis on chemical distributions, it is found that the melt pool has a mixture of the partly melted substrate and powders. However, in the keyhole region, only the alloying elements of the substrate are detected due to the repulsion of the melted powder materials caused by the recoil pressure. This work can offer guidance on parameter optimization for the fabrication of SLMed grinding wheels.