This work employed laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) technology to prepare pure tungsten (W) metal components and investigated their internal defects, microstructural characteristics and mechanical properties within the horizontal and vertical planes to evaluate their anisotropic behavior. The steep temperature gradient and extremely rapid cooling rate during the LPBF process caused the as-deposited W grains to grow in a columnar crystal structure along the vertical height direction, with cracks propagating along the high-angle grain boundaries (HAGBs). Although the near-equiaxed W grains within the horizontal plane were finer than the epitaxial grains within the vertical plane, the increased number of cracks within the horizontal plane weakened the fine-grained strengthening effect, resulting in lower hardness and wear resistance within the horizontal plane than within the vertical plane. The wear behavior transformed from a comprehensive wear mechanism involving delamination wear and abrasive wear within the vertical plane to an abrasive wear mechanism with slight adhesive wear within the horizontal plane. The reported results demonstrate that the anisotropic behavior of hardness and wear resistance within the different deposition planes was mainly attributed to the differences in microstructure and crack distribution between the horizontal and vertical planes of LPBF-fabricated W parts.
Ge et al. (Thu,) studied this question.