Additive manufacturing processes such as laser powder bed fusion (PBF-LB) offer the ability to produce parts in a single manufacturing step. On the one hand, this manufacturing technique offers immense geometric freedom in part design due to its layer-by-layer manufacturing strategy. On the other hand, the localized melting and solidification impose the presence of large temperature gradients in the process. From a microstructural perspective, this inevitably results in micro-segregation and a columnar grain structure, often paired with a significant crystallographic texture. Even worse, these large temperature gradients can lead to internal stress-induced deformation or cracking during processing. At the very least, residual stress is retained in the final structures as a footprint of this internal stress. In this context, diffraction-based methods allow the non-destructive characterization of the residual stress field in a non-destructive fashion. However, the accuracy of these methods is directly related to the microstructural characteristics of the material of interest. First, diffraction-based methods access microscopic lattice strains. To relate these lattice strains to a macroscopic stress, so-called diffraction elastic constants must be known. The deformation behavior is directly linked to the microstructure. Therefore, the diffraction elastic constants also depend on the microstructure. Second, the presence of crystallographic texture should be considered in the residual stress determination, as variations in crystal orientations contribute differently to the diffraction signal.

Here we present the influence of the microstructure on the determination of residual stress by diffraction-based methods in as-built PBF-LB Inconel 718 parts. We obtained different microstructures by employing two different scanning strategies. In particular, different crystallographic textures were obtained by changing the relative angle of the scan vectors to the geometric axes of the part. The texture-based characterization of the residual stress field was carried out by surface, sub-surface, and bulk residual stress measurements. It was found that the residual stress determination significantly depends on the microstructure for strong crystallographic textures.