Surface quality and forming characteristics of thin-wall aluminium alloy parts manufactured by laser assisted MIG arc additive manufacturing

An innovative additive manufacturing (AM) system using low power pulsed laser assisted MIG arc welding (L-M) was proposed to manufacture metal products. With the purpose of revealing how width and height dimension of the manufactured thin-wall component are affected by the laser power, the present study has been carried out. The width decreased with the increasing of the laser power within a certain range of laser power, and the height increased proportionally under the equal deposition rate. The width and height fluctuation reduced while adding the low power laser, both the standard deviation decreased by more than 50％ when the laser power was 400 W. The coefficient of materials utilization was up to 91.12%, and increased by more than 15% while using L-M based AM to fabricate thin-wall parts with a proper laser power. In comparison with the common GMAW-based AM method, the L-M based AM method shows feasibility to manufacture a narrower thin-wall component with better surface quality and higher stability, and also with higher deposition efficiency.