Because magnets fabricated using Nd-Fe-B exhibit excellent magnetic properties, this novel material is used in various high-tech industries. However, because of the brittleness and low formability of Nd-Fe-B magnets, the design freedom of shapes for improving the performance is limited based on conventional tooling and postprocessing. Laserpowder bed fusion (L-PBF), the most famous additive manufacturing (AM) technique, has recently emerged as a novel process for producing geometrically complex shapes of Nd-Fe-B parts owing to its high precision and good spatial resolution. However, because of the repeated thermal shock applied to the materials during L-PBF, it is difficult to fabricate a dense Nd-Fe-B magnet. In this study, a high-density (>96%) Nd-Fe-B magnet is successfully fabricated by minimizing the thermal residual stress caused by substrate heating during L-PBF.

We present a systematic study of the heating and pre-sintering behavior of porous copper powder metal compacts. We employ a TE102 single mode microwave system to position the samples in the separated electric field (E) or magnetic field (H) anti-node of the cavity. We observe significant differences in the heating, pre-sintering, and microstructure evolution of the samples due to the individual fields. We note that sample history (whether heated first in the E-field or H-field) greatly effects a difference in heating trends and subsequent heating behavior and does not appear to be solely a thermal process.