Atomic-Scale Perspective at Alloy-Design for Additive Manufacturing

Additive Manufacturing is capable of producing highly complex parts directly from a computer file and raw material powders. Its disruptive potential lies in its ability to manufacture customised products with individualisation, complexity and weight reduction for free [1-3].<br/>The lecture provides a brief overview of our research which aims to understand the impact of this manufacturing process on complex engineering alloys at the atomic- and nanoscale as well as to develop metallic materials suitable for and exploiting the unique characteristics of Additive Manufacturing.<br/>While Additive Manufacturing, and in particular Laser Additive Manufacturing, is by now fairly well-established as a process to produce metallic parts, studies targeting the segregation and structural interface features at the atomic- and nanoscale for microstructure-optimisation of existing alloys and the design of novel advanced alloys tailored specifically to Laser Additive Manufacturing are still sparse. The established alloys currently in use do not exploit the enormous opportunities inherent in this technique at all, leaving a gap towards its further development.<br/> <br/>1. Kürnsteiner P, Wilms MB, Weisheit A, Gault B, Jägle EA, Raabe D. 2020. High-strength Damascus steel by additive manufacturing. <i>Nature</i>. 582(7813):515–19<br/>2. Sun Z, Tan X, Wang C, Descoins M, Mangelinck D, et al. 2021. Reducing hot tearing by grain boundary segregation engineering in additive manufacturing: example of an AlxCoCrFeNi high-entropy alloy. <i>Acta Mater.</i> 204:116505<br/>3. Bajaj P, Hariharan A, Kini A, Kürnsteiner P, Raabe D, Jägle EAEAA. 2020. Steels in additive manufacturing: A review of their microstructure and properties. <i>Mater. Sci. Eng. A</i>. 772 (Nov. 2019):138633