Yttria stabilized zirconia (YSZ) thin wall structures fabricated using laser engineered net shaping (LENS)

Zhiqi Fan1 & Yitian Zhao1 & Mingyuan Lu1 & Han Huang1

Springer-Verlag London Ltd., part of Springer Nature 2019

Abstract

Yttria stabilized zirconia (YSZ) thin wall components were fabricated using laser engineered net shaping (LENS) technique. It was found that after LENS processing, the monoclinic (m) phase in as-received YSZ powders transformed to tetragonal (t) and cubic (c) phases with the lenticular shaped t-ZrO2 embedded in the c-ZrO2 matrix. The relative density of the parts reached up to 98.7%. Our investigation showed that micro cracks within the wall structure were reduced by judiciously choosing laser power parameter. The fabricated parts have surface roughness values that ranged from 20 to 40 μm. The maximum hardness and elastic modulus achieved from the LENSed YSZ parts were 19.8 GPa and 236.1 GPa, respectively. We also demonstrated that dark brown color of the LENSed parts could be removed via heat treatment.