Over the past decades, in the never-ending endeavour for improved or even newly invented materials, that comply better under the incessantly increasing performance requirements with the big goal of reducing humanity’s carbon footprint, the search for equally augmented manufacturing techniques has often led to the field of additive manufacturing. Even though additive manufacturing oftentimes seemed to have been the answer to difficult-to-manufacture components, as of today, it is not the standard method of choice in most fields of work. The production of soft magnetic components, for instance stator parts of electric motors and generators, is no exception in that regard. On the grounds, that the advantage of mass production still predominates the possibility to do so in a more sustainable way by reducing the amount of material needed to manufacture a certain part with as little accompanying waste as possible. Thus, the aim of this thesis was to show the feasibility to additively produce ferritic soft magnetic samples out of ferrosilicon with varying silicon contents. Furthermore, it could be shown that the produced samples yield adequate mechanical properties, comparable to those of current soft magnetic materials used in electric motors and generators. A consistent distribution of Vickers hardness, which was used as the indicator property for their mechanical performance, throughout the samples could be achieved through a methodical parameter study, while using less starting material due to the employed laser powder bed fusion method instead of the now state of the art multi-step process of rolling, stacking, welding and cutting of soft magnetic metal sheets. The magnetic properties were investigated qualitatively, which, in combination with the mechanical testing data, led to a recommendation for possible future process parameter refinements.
Additive manufacturing shows promising potential to reduce the initial amount of material that is needed for production and to simultaneously reduce the weight of the finished parts due to the possibility of producing parts that are optimized not only according to the main mechanical loads, but also to the later present operational magnetic flux. Thus, loosely fitting Sullivan’s basic maxim of design ‘form follows function’: form follows flux.