Effect of hard and soft re-coater blade on porosity and processability of thin walls and overhangs in laser powder bed fusion additive manufacturing

Spreading powder into thin layers is a fundamental step in the laser powder bed fusion (PBF-LB) additive manufacturing process. This step is called re-coating and it is typically performed using either a hard, soft or brush-type re-coater blade or a rotating roller, depending on the machine brand and model. With such variety in powder spreading approaches, the question arises whether the used re-coater type has a significant effect on the quality of parts produced? In this study, an industrial contact image sensor integrated to the re-coater of a PBF-LB system was used for powder bed quality monitoring. Powder bed images at 21 µm/pixel resolution, 184 mm scanning width and 95 mm/s re-coating speed were acquired. With this, the effect of using either soft (rubber) or hard (steel) re-coater blade on the processability of challenging features such as thin walls and steep overhangs was studied. In addition, porosity and dimensional accuracy of parts produced using either the soft or hard blade was analyzed with X-ray computed tomography. It is shown that when building bulk material without any complex features, both the hard and soft re-coating blade results in extremely low porosity ≤ 0.001% without any issues in the processability. However, when thin walls and overhangs are produced, differences in processability, porosity and dimensional accuracy are observed as a function of re-coater blade and part orientation. This is an important factor in understanding all the significant sources contributing to the variability on quality of parts produced using different PBF-LB machines.