Successful additive manufacturing of MoSi₂including crystallographic texture and shape control

MoSi₂is 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 MoSi₂samples via additive manufacturing (AM). Control of the thermal expansion coefficient of the start plate for AM is important for building a three-dimensional MoSi₂product with a low deformability. Moreover, unidirectional laser scanning is found to be significantly effective for controlling the crystallographic texture in MoSi₂with 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 MoSi₂products with better high-temperature strength.