Plasma electrolytic Polishing of additively manufactured metal parts: Optimizing the post processing workflow-Data

Due to its unique manufacturing capabilities, additive manufacturing of metal parts is gaining acceptance in the industry. Higher surface roughness of printed parts is one of the major challenges of this advanced manufacturing technique, which requires a crucial post-processing stage before the components can be used in practice. This study investigates the influence of Plasma electrolytic Polishing (PeP) and the combination of PeP and particle blasting as a post-processing technique for additively manufactured stainless steel samples. * AISI SS316L samples were prepared at the Israel Institute of Metals, Technion. * 6 samples were prepared for analysis and investigated for particle blasting and PeP at different time durations as shown in Table 1. * The surface roughness values of as-built samples and after polishing are presented in Table 2. The results show a 70% improvement in surface roughness after 10 minutes of particle blasting and 3 minutes of PeP in sequence and present the possibility of optimizing processing time to achieve better surface qualities with minimal post-processing time.