Tribological analysis of wire additive manufactured Ti-6Al-4V by electron beam source

Additive manufacturing through electron beam is an attractive and fast-growing additive manufacturing process for complex geometry in the aerospace, automotive and rapid tooling industry. Layer by layer generation of additive material ends up in the variation in properties in each layer gives to a form of functionally graded material. Ti-6Al-4V samples were realized through wire electron beam additive manufacturing by Pre -positioning the wire and then fusing it to the substrate material. Then layer by layer addition was made to realize the bulk additive Ti-6Al-4V material. The samples were subjected to metallurgical analysis to explore structural behaviour and to a standard dry sliding wear test to explore the tribological behaviour. The wear analysis exposed the substantial effects of parameters on the wear rate. The comparison of wear results with the base material under different working conditions shows that the additive manufacture sample has better wear resistance compared with the base alloy. Besides, the mechanisms that significantly influenced the wear rate was identified with worn surface and debris analysis.