High-strength silicon brass manufactured by selective laser melting

Generally, metallic alloys adaptive to selective laser melting (SLM) need to meet three basic physical properties, i.e. relatively high laser absorptivity, relatively low thermal conductivity, and especially non-containing low boiling point volatile elements. In this work, high-strength Cu-12.5Zn-2.9Si silicon brass, which does not meet these three requirements, was manufactured by SLM from gas-atomized powder. Interestingly, the SLM-manufactured silicon brass has high relative density (98.8%) thereby exhibiting higher strength than that for cast counterpart. Accordingly, this work substantiates, for the first time, the feasibility by SLM to manufacture high-strength metallic alloys with special physical properties.