Toward Precision Additive Manufacturing for Extremes—Opportunities and Challenges of ML-Enabled Closed Loop Approaches

Extreme environments, including radiation, high temperature, and corrosion, present grand challenges for current materials systems. Novel materials to overcome these challenges have been discovered at a feverish pace in recent years, owing in part to high throughput and combinatorial approaches. Unfortunately, promising materials systems underperform due to processing and manufacturing limitations, as well as geometric and density constraints. Additive manufacturing promises the answer to many of these challenges, however control of build processes remains an elusive goal. This talk presents advances in precise additive manufacturing through closed loop processes, embedding artificial intelligence and machine learning approaches with computing and sensing hardware during the build process. Success in tailoring structures at the level of the meltpool, and below, is shown. The ability to design and tune alloys at a microstructural level is shown to be possible, and to be tailored toward specific extreme applications.