Dominic Bartels: Additive manufacturing of steel parts
Earlier this year, Dominic Bartels published his work on in-situ modification of case-hardening steel. He continues these efforts in his recent work “PBF-LB/M of Low-Alloyed Steels: Bainite-like Microstructures despite High Cooling Rates”. It focusses on the processing of this group of steels using laser-based additive manufacturing. Dominic shows that the resulting low-alloyed steel specimen can possess so called bainite-like properties. This helps when designing sophisticated products as the bainite microstructure is favorable in many applications like bearings or gears due to its excellent strength and ductility.
To further exploit these potentials, Dominic investigated the deposition of reinforced coatings by addition of hard phase particles. Adding tungsten carbide significantly strengthens the steel matrix and helps in generating a protective cladding with exceptional hardness. Details are found in his article “Laser Metal Deposition of Carbide-reinforced low-alloyed steel Bainidur AM”.
Dominic Bartels works at the Institute of Photonic Technologies, his supervisor is Michael Schmidt. The original publications can be found in Materials and in Procedia CIRP.
