Tailored Surface Texture Characterisation of Metal Additive Components for Aerospace Applications

In the past decades, additive manufacturing (AM) has been evolving from a rapid prototyping technology towards a mature manufacturing process with significant advantages for lightweigh tdesign and the potential of fulfillin requirements for highly demanding and specialised applications. Surface quality is often of functional importance and hence critical for the qualification of metal AM parts, particularly for load-bearing aerospace applications.
Surface quality resulting from a laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) AM process is typically characterised by agglomerations of attached powder particles, spatter, weld or layer tracks. The specific features depend on the used material, powder properties, build direction and further influencin factors.
This work contributes to a more comprehensive understanding and an improved, more holistic description of surface quality from LPBF, its formation, characterisation, and role in part functionality. This will be achieved by taking novel approaches to tailored surface texture characterisation of metal AM parts from LPBF, employing state-of-the-art optical measurement techniques and a real surface texture characterisation.
The results of this thesis are presented in three parts: "Measurement and Data Post-processing", "Surface Texture and Mechanical Properties" and "Areal Surface Features".