Laser Powder bed fusion (L-PBF) has attracted a lot of interest in recent years, not only for its profound advantage of producing metallic components of complex geometries but also for the possibility of manipulating microstructures and the crystallographic texture. Additionally, recent observations on wrought austenitic steels have revealed the strong dependence of the transformation induced plasticity (TRIP) effect in metastable stainless steels on the crystallographic texture [1]–[3]. Taking the aforementioned observations into consideration, we employ a 304L steel, processed by L-PBF, in order to produce differently textured specimens. Uniaxial tension tests, paired with in-situ diffraction techniques, enable the monitoring of the secondary hardening phenomena during deformation and correlating them to the strong crystallographic textures and enhanced TRIP effect. The present study highlights that L-PBF is an engineering tool for tailoring the microstructure and for obtaining different deformation behavior in austenitic stainless steels, which paves the way for creating complex materials with locally tailored microstructures.

Bibliography

[1] E. Polatidis et al., “The interplay between deformation mechanisms in austenitic 304 steel during uniaxial and equibiaxial loading,” 2019, doi: 10.1016/j.msea.2019.138222.

[2] E. Polatidis et al., “Suppressed martensitic transformation under biaxial loading in low stacking fault energy metastable austenitic steels,” Scr. Mater., vol. 147, pp. 27–32, Apr. 2018, doi: 10.1016/j.scriptamat.2017.12.026.

[3] E. Polatidis, J. Čapek, A. Arabi-Hashemi, C. Leinenbach, and M. Strobl, “High ductility and transformation-induced-plasticity in metastable stainless steel processed by selective laser melting with low power,” Scr. Mater., vol. 176, pp. 53–57, Feb. 2020, doi: 10.1016/j.scriptamat.2019.09.035.