Single track versus bulk samples: Understanding the grain refinement in inoculated ferritic stainless steels manufactured by powder bed fusion-laser beam

Journal article, 2023

One generic challenge in powder bed fusion - laser beam (PBF-LB) is the formation of epitaxially grown columnar grains, which lead to the undesirable anisotropy of mechanical properties. This anisotropy could be rectified by ex-situ or in-situ inoculation in some particular alloy systems. Understanding the grain refinement mechanism caused by in-situ inoculation is, however, complicated by remelting caused by the overlapping between neighboring scan tracks, when printing bulk samples using multiple tracks. Here in this work, a series of single tracks using ferritic stainless steels feedstock powder with and without pre-alloyed inoculant-forming elements, were printed at different scanning speeds to gain refreshed understanding on the mechanism of the observed grain refinement. Interestingly, the grain refinement in single tracks and bulk samples printed from the powder with and without inoculant-forming elements showed an opposite tendency. When using the powder without inoculant-forming elements, the single tracks showed large columnar grains, while the bulk samples showed even larger grain sizes; when using the powder with pre-alloyed inoculant-forming elements, fine equiaxed grains are found at the centers of the melt pools, surrounded by slightly coarser columnar grains at melt pool boundaries, in both single tracks and bulk samples. Noticeably, the mean grain sizes in the bulk samples are however smaller compared to those for single tracks because of remelting. Our work provides new insights on the grain refinement via in-situ inoculation during the PBF-LB process and highlights the importance of studying single tracks to better understand the melting and solidification behavior.