Development of an accurate “composition-process-properties” dataset for SLMed Al-Si-(Mg) alloys and its application in alloy design
Tianchuang Gao, Jianbao Gao, Jinliang Zhang, Bo Song, Lijun Zhang
Abstract
Al-Si-Mg series alloys are the most common alloys available for additive manufacturing forming with low cracking tendency. However, there is no systematic study on the computational design of SLMed Al-Si-(Mg) alloys due to the huge parameter space of composition and processes. In this paper, a high-quality dataset of SLMed Al-Si-(Mg) alloys containing 176 pieces of data from 50 publications was first established, which recorded the information, including alloy compositions, process parameters, test conditions, and mechanical properties. A threshold value of 35 J/mm3 for energy density (Ed) was then proposed as a criterion to clean the data points with lower ultimate tensile strength (UTS) and elongation (EL). The cleaned dataset consists of a first training/testing dataset with 142 data for model construction and a second testing dataset with 9 data for model verification. After that, four machine learning models were applied to establish the quantitative relation of “composition-processes-properties” in SLMed Al-Si-(Mg) alloys. The MLPReg model was chosen as the optimal one considering its best performance and subsequently utilized to design novel compositions and process parameters for SLMed Al-Si-(Mg) alloys. The UTS and EL of the designed alloy with a maximum comprehensive mechanical property are 549 MPa and 16%, both of which are higher than all the available experimental data. It is anticipated that the present design strategy based on the machine learning method should generally be applicable to other SLMed alloy systems.