Combined Treatment of Parts Produced by Additive Manufacturing Methods for Improving the Surface Quality

Abstract

To improve the quality of a part manufactured by the additive method, it is necessary to eliminate the porosity and high roughness of its surface, as well as to deposit a coating on it. For this purpose, in the present work, we studied the combined processing in a gas discharge plasma of complex shape parts obtained by the additive manufacturing method, which includes explosive ablation of surface protrusions when voltage pulses are applied to the part immersed in the plasma; polishing with a concentrated beam of fast neutral argon atoms at a large angle of incidence on the surface of the part, and magnetron deposition of a coating on it with assistance by fast argon atoms. Combined processing made it possible to completely get rid of porosity and reduce the surface roughness from Ra ~ 5 µm to Ra ~ 0.05 µm.