Laser engineered net shaping is a promising additive manufacturing technique that can be used for building three-dimensional components directly from CAD models by layer-wise deposition. Components with high performance and complex geometry can be achieved rapidly by this technology, and components of metal, ceramic or composite material have been successfully fabricated and used in many industrial field. High properties of fabricated specimens and high deposition efficiency are both important for laser engineered net shaping, but few researches have been done on the relationship between them. In this paper, single-bead multilayer structures of 316L stainless steel are fabricated by laser engineered net shaping system. Using the same laser power and scanning speed, different deposition efficiencies are achieved by adjusting powder flow rate and layer increment. Microstructure of each specimen is analyzed by SEM. Tensile strength and micro-hardness of the deposited structures under different deposition efficiencies are tested, respectively.

laser engineered net shaping; 316L stainless steel; deposition efficiency; microstructure; mechanical prop-erty