Residual Stresses Measurements in Laser Powder Bed Fusion Using Barkhausen Noise Analysis

In recent years, the advancement of technology brought the laser powder bed fusion process to its industrialisation step. Despite all the advancements in process repeatability and general quality control, many challenges remain unsolved due to the intrinsic difficulties of the process, notably the residual stresses issue. This work aimed to assess the usability of Barkhausen noise analysis (BNA) for the residual stress in situ monitoring of laser powder bed fusion on Maraging steel 300 (18Ni-300/1.2709). After measuring the evolution of grain size distribution over process parameter changes, two series of experiments were designed. First, a setup with an external force allows to validate the working principle of BNA on the chosen material processed using LPBF. The second experiment uses on-plates samples with different residual stress states. The results show a good stability in microstructure, a prerequisite for BNA. In addition, the external load setup acknowledges that signal variation correlates with the induced stress state. Finally, the on-plate measurement shows a similar signal variation to what has been observed in the literature for residual stress variation. It is shown that BNA is a suitable method for qualitative residual stresses variation monitoring developed during the LPBF process and underlines that BNA is a promising candidate as an in situ measurement method.