The Effect of a Scanning Strategy on the Residual Stress of 316L Steel Parts Fabricated by Selective Laser Melting (SLM)

The laser scanning strategy has an important influence on the surface quality, residual stress, and deformation of the molten metal (deformation behavior). A divisional scanning strategy is an effective means used to reduce the internal stress of the selective laser melting (SLM) metal part. In order to understand and optimize the divisional scanning strategy, three divisional scanning strategies and an S-shaped orthogonal scanning strategy are used to produce 316L steel parts in this study. The influence of scanning strategy on the produced parts is verified from the aspects of densification, residual stress distribution and deformation. Experiments show that the 316L steel alloy parts adopted spiral divisional scanning strategy can not only obtain the densification of 99.37%, but they also effectively improve the distribution of residual stress and control the deformation degree of the produced parts. Among them, the spiral divisional scanning sample has the smallest residual stress in plane direction, and its sigma(x) and sigma(y) stress are controlled within 204 MPa and 103 MPa. The above results show that the spiral divisional scanning is the most conducive strategy to obtain higher residual stress performance of SLM 316L steel parts.