Effects of Post Processing methods on the Mechanical and Electrical properties of Electron Beam Powder Bed Fusion of Unalloyed Copper.

The excellent thermal and electrical properties of copper have made it impossible for the manufacturers of heat exchangers, electronic motors and vacuum electronic devices (VED’s) to ignore. The complexity of these components geometrically for cooling and heating makes additive manufacturing an evitable process of manufacturing the parts as opposed to traditional methods like injection molding, CNC machining and casting. These industrial companies often require components to be very dense, with low oxygen content as well as have very good surface finishes in order to have an overall better performance in real life applications. These strict requirements happen to be some setbacks which limits the wide application of additive manufacturing. The process parameters utilized in fabricating parts, the size distribution of the metallic powder, layer thickness and both conventional and non-conventional methods have been widely studied by most authors to meet these demands. The use of hot-isostatic pressing (HIP), hydrogen heat treatment and vacuum heat treatment, CNC machining and electrochemical polishing are several post processing methods that have been employed to tackle dense, low oxygen and good surfaces of additive manufactured parts respectively. In this study, these post processes are been optimized to meet the uncompromising material properties desired for application of copper through EB-PBF.