Structural Integrity of Additive Manufactured Materials
Status: Proposal
Date Announced: November, 2024
Project reference: PROP312611
Summary
Additive manufacturing (AM) is an emerging technology that has gained large interest in the past decade due to its potential to produce customised components with complex geometries. However, before using the AM materials in safety-critical applications, it is necessary to understand the material’s behaviour under complex loading such as fatigue. This project aims to perform structural integrity assessment of materials produced via AM focusing on the fracture and fatigue performance of additive manufactured steel, copper, nickel and titanium alloys. There are various types of AM technologies on the market that can be categorised based on their feedstock and energy source. The focus of this project will be on three AM processes: direct energy deposition (DED), wire-arc direct energy deposition (DED), and laser powder bed fusion (L-PBF).
Structural integrity assessment will be carried out in terms of fracture toughness, fatigue endurance and fatigue crack growth testing in air, hydrogen, and elevated temperature environments, along with post-test analysis and correlation between process-microstructure-properties leading to certification and qualification of the material.
Project Concept
AM is an emerging technology that has gained large interest in the past decade due to its potential to produce customised components with complex geometries. In spite of this great advantage, the material behaviour produced by AM is not fully understood yet, mainly due to the different manufacturing process that the material is going through compared to conventional processes, such as complex thermal history, layer-wise manufacturing, and a large number of process parameters involved in AM; changing each of which can affect the final products in terms of their microstructure and accordingly mechanical performance.
Therefore, it is essential to understand the AM material behaviour before using them in safety-critical applications. It has been observed that many failures in safety-critical components occur due to fatigue and/or fracture. Therefore, it is important to assess the AM material performance under both these modes of failure.