Experimental study of a novel layer deposition technique and its effect on anisotropic behavior of wire arc additively manufactured steel parts

This work investigates the possibility of reducing the anisotropic behavior of wire arc additively manufactured (WAAM) parts by a new layer deposition technique. An experiment was carried out in which specimens were printed using AWS E6013 low carbon steel electrodes. In printing the specimens, sets of layers were deposited bottom-up (along Z-axis) at different inclination angles (namely, 0, +/- 15, +/- 30 and +/- 45) with respect to X-axis of substrate XZ-plane. Results show that the proposed technique does reduce anisotropic behavior of printed parts when deposition angles of +/- 30 and +/- 45 are used. Parts printed with layer sets deposited at +/- 45 inclinations showed least anisotropy and highest tensile strength, but they also had longer building times as compared with the other specimens.