Overview of Materials Qualification Needs for Metal Additive Manufacturing

This overview highlights some of the key aspects regarding materials qualification needs across the additive manufacturing (AM) spectrum. AM technology has experienced considerable publicity and growth in the past few years with many successful insertions for non-mission-critical applications. However, to meet the full potential that AM has to offer, especially for flight-critical components (e.g., rotating parts, fracture-critical parts, etc.), qualification and certification efforts are necessary. While development of qualification standards will address some of these needs, this overview outlines some of the other key areas that will need to be considered in the qualification path, including various process-, microstructure-, and fracture-modeling activities in addition to integrating these with lifing activities targeting specific components. Ongoing work in the Advanced Manufacturing and Mechanical Reliability Center at Case Western Reserve University is focusing on fracture and fatigue testing to rapidly assess critical mechanical properties of some titanium alloys before and after post-processing, in addition to conducting nondestructive testing/evaluation using micro-computerized tomography at General Electric. Process mapping studies are being conducted at Carnegie Mellon University while large area microstructure characterization and informatics (EBSD and BSE) analyses are being conducted at Materials Resources LLC to enable future integration of these efforts via an Integrated Computational Materials Engineering approach to AM. Possible future pathways for materials qualification are provided.