Aircraft piston engine parts have been proposed to be manufactured not by conventional metal processing, but by layer-by-layer laser melting of metallic powder. The new technology was developed by Samara National Research University named after Academician S. P. Korolev (SSAU).
The designers propose using an aluminum alloy of the Al-Mg-Sc system. The blank is formed directly during the selective laser melting process: the machine applies metallic powder in thin layers and then locally melts it with a laser beam.
The thickness of one layer in the patented technology is only 50 µm. For the main area of the part, it is proposed to use a laser power of 350–400 W, a scanning speed of 950–1050 mm/s, and a scanning step of 0.11 mm.
Separate parameters are provided for contour processing. There, the laser power is reduced to 300–320 W, and the scanning speed to 250–300 mm/s.
This approach allows obtaining blanks of complex-shaped parts directly from a digital model and potentially reducing the number of subsequent processing operations.