Influence of Post-treatments on Corrosion Properties of 3D printed Metal Components for Bioprocessing Applications

Abstract: Additive manufacturing (AM) has the potential to overtake the conventional production of pipe systems of stainless steel grade 316L intended for bioprocessing applications by utilising powder bed fusion laser beam (PBF-LB) technologies. However, challenges such as high surface roughness need to be overcome and corrosion properties improved to meet industry standards. This can be done by applying surface post-treatments to the printed parts. Therefore, the first aim of this thesis was to investigate the ability of different post-treatments of PBF-LB 316L samples, including tumbling, electropolishing, chemical milling, Hirtisation®, and DryLyte®, to reduce the surface roughness. One set of samples was left untreated, as-built set, and used as reference. The second aim was to try to correlate the surface roughness with the corrosion properties of the various post-treated samples. Analytical techniques used included needle profilometry, light optical microscopy (LOM), critical pitting temperature (CPT), cyclic potentiodynamic polarisation (CPDP) and immersion in 1M NaCl and 1M NaOH for two different durations for each solution. While some results were expected, others were surprising. Even though tumbled samples resulted in the lowest surface roughness, the results for immersion and CPDP curves tests indicated the lowest corrosion resistance compared to the other post-treatments. On the other hand, electropolishing resulted in the lowest surface roughness reduction among the post-treated samples. However, these samples had comparatively high corrosion resistance in the CPT and CPDP tests. The DryLyte® samples were tested using two DryLyte® medias where one of them resulted in the second lowest surface roughness and showed highest corrosion resistance in all three corrosion tests even though the process parameters are still to be developed. The results for samples post-treated by Hirtisation® and chemical milling were inconsistent and need further investigations. The reference as-built set showed high corrosion resistance in its untreated state, indicating post-treatments having minor impact on its performance from a corrosion perspective.