Additive Manufacturing (AM) is an uprising manufacturing process for parts with complex geometries and low production quantities. Within the layer-wise building process, less additional processes are needed, to produce the parts. This allows a building of parts within a reasonable time- and costs-range. Especially industries, such as aerospace industry, can profit from AM. Electron beam – Powder bed fusion (EB-PBF) is a common technique, within AM, to produce metallic parts out of special alloys such as Alloy 718. This superalloy is a Nickle-Iron based alloy that has high mechanical properties, even in elevated temperatures (up to 650ºC). The combination of such material properties with high geometrical freedom creates new opportunities for the industry. However, it must be noted that a significant drawback of AM-techniques is the need for post-processing because of surface roughness- and microstructural characteristics. Commonly, the produced parts utilize mechanical post process such as milling to provide good surface roughness and dimensional accuracy. To reduce the surface roughness in the contour region, and therefore reduce the amount of mechanical post-processing, the present survey elaborates the effect of relevant parameters on contours such as the number of contours, scanning speed, focus offset and beam current. By using Design of Experiments (DOE), two batches were carried out: one screening batch and a two-level-full factorial design. In those batches, 15×15×15 mm cubes were printed with various parameters and, after that, analysed by using White light interferometry (WLI), Optical microscopy (OM) and Scanning electron microscopy (SEM). Furthermore, the program ImageJ was used to perform porosity and melt pool measurements.

It had been observed that the number of contours had quite a considerable impact on the final surface roughness and the number of defects. Samples with two contours, instead of only one, tend to have a lower surface roughness. Nevertheless, the parameters and their interaction were found to have fundamental effects on the resulting surface roughness and microstructure.