Post by Jose Manuel Crego Lozares

New paper out! 📄 When you deposit CuCrZr onto IN718 using a laser, a lot can go wrong — copper absorbs as little as 5% of infrared laser energy in solid state, the thermal conductivity difference between the two alloys is nearly tenfold, and controlling how much substrate gets remelted into the deposited layer is anything but straightforward. The short version: changing the shape of the laser beam — not just the power or speed — turns out to be the key lever. It controls how deep the melt pool goes, how much of the substrate gets remelted, and even whether cracks form in the heat-affected zone. One of the configurations we tested produced a heat-affected zone that barely changed regardless of the laser parameters used — which is the kind of robustness you want when moving towards real parts. There's still a lot to understand, but this work gives us a solid foundation for the next step: bulk multi-material samples. Grateful to Andrey Molotnikov, Milan Brandt, Alexander Medvedev at RMIT Centre for Additive Manufacturing and Ingomar Kelbassa (Mr.) at Institute for Industrialization of Smart Materials (ISM), Hamburg University of Technology for their guidance throughout. This research is part of the REDI Program (RMIT European Doctoral Innovators), funded under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 101034328. 🚀 🔗 https://lnkd.in/eSMh5d6U #additive_manufacturing #3dprinting #MultiMaterialAM #Aerospace #BeamShaping #REDIProgram #MSCA #TUHH #RMIT