Abstract The importance of additive manufacturing of metal components is increasing in industry due to new production strategies and the associated increase in cost-effectiveness. Especially for the production of small series, prototypes, or individual parts, economical production alternatives can be expected due to the near-net-shape component structure. Approaches for higher efficiency of the component cooling during the build process indicate the potential for increasing the productivity of wire arc directed energy deposition (DED-Arc). Moreover, the control of the cooling rate is of interest for the processing of materials with low thermal diffusivity such as high-alloy steels. Therefore, in situ component cooling in DED-Arc additive manufacturing using a cooling gas flow is discussed in this article. Previously, fundamental investigations upon design and process parameters have been carried out in this subject. Based on these, a selection of derived design concepts for cooling gas nozzle sets is demonstrated in the present study. These were examined by means of a CFD model (computational fluid dynamics) for the flow of cooling gas onto a plate. The performance when applied to a flat component has been both evaluated model-based with respect to the shielding gas flow and the cooling effect as well as experimentally by measuring the residual oxygen fraction in the shielding gas atmosphere for selected variants.
Manzke et al. (Sat,) studied this question.