Successful additive manufacturing of MoSi2 including crystallographic texture and shape control

Abstract

MoSi2 is one of the promising candidates for ultrahigh-temperature structural materials. However, its product fabrication has been limited owing to its significant brittleness until now. As an approach to overcome this, we have first successfully fabricated MoSi2 samples via additive manufacturing (AM). Control of the thermal expansion coefficient of the start plate for AM is important for building a three-dimensional MoSi2 product with a low deformability. Moreover, unidirectional laser scanning is found to be significantly effective for controlling the crystallographic texture in MoSi2 with a low crystal symmetry. By the unidirectional scanning, [001] texture could be developed along the scanning direction, which possibly results in the fabrication of the MoSi2 products with better high-temperature strength.