Micro-pores formation mechanism and porosity on the fatigue performance of dual laser-powder bed fusion of Ti6Al4V

Abstract

Porosity significantly impacts the fatigue performance and stability of dual laser additively manufactured metallic materials. This study presents a comparative analysis of the fatigue behavior of samples fabricated by single-laser powder bed fusion (SL-PBF) and dual-laser PBF (DL-PBF). It shows that porosity defects in the overlap region reduced the fatigue strength of DL-PBF samples by nearly 20 %. Micro-CT analysis revealed that micro-pores in the SL-PBF samples were predominantly located in the contour regions. Machining with a removal depth of 0.5 mm has effectively eliminated over 90 % of internal porosity defects. For monolithic specimens, increasing the sample size and reducing the layer-wise slice area can improve the sphericity of the internal defects (0.71 to 0.85) and reduce the porosity density (0.19 % to 0.011 %). Molecular dynamics simulations further examined the influence of pore size, spacing, and quantity on fatigue behavior. Larger pore sizes promote the formation of {11 $\overline{\text{2}}$ 1} <$\overline{\text{1}}\overline{\text{1}}$26> twin variants, as the pore diameter increased from 20 Å to 80 Å, the proportion of variants structure increased from 3.6 % to 11.5 %. Fatigue failure initiated from a single pore, with stress propagating towards a distant pore, forming crack paths. Stress was relieved along these crack trajectories, leading to secondary crack branches that spread into low-stress zones around other defects, which resulted in fatigue cracks with vein-like morphologies. This work provides systematic insights into the fatigue degradation mechanisms induced by porosity and offers actionable strategies for improving the fatigue resistance of multi-laser PBF components through process control.