Sensitisation behaviour of drop-deposited 11% Cr ferritic stainless steel

For low-chromium ferritic stainless steel, a recently developed laser-driven drop-deposition technique enabled the building of three adjacent tracks on a substrate sheet of the same alloy, to study its risk for sensitisation from certain sequences of thermal cycles. The process was recorded by high-speed imaging to understand the drop-deposition mechanisms. Higher beam power resulted in a smoother track. The added layer was fully martensitic, achieving an elevated hardness of 320 HV. For a temperature peak just below austenitisation, the thermal cycle from a subsequent track affected the former track through tempering. Etching revealed a continuous region of ditched grain boundaries around the interface between the melted and heat affected zones. In the melted zone, the network became discontinuous approaching the surface, meaning that the specimen was immune to sensitisation, in contrast to transformation hardening results in the solid state. Additive manufacturing can induce manifold sequences of thermal cycles, but from the here generalized knowledge, strategies against sensitisation can be derived.