Developments In Additive Manufacturing

There have been significant developments in the field of additive manufacture in recent years, and TWI has taken a strong lead in the area of Laser Metal Deposition (LMD) using blown powder and Selective Laser Melting (SLM) using powder bed systems. A large amount of development work has been carried out at TWI’s Yorkshire facility using state of the art equipment, including work with a leading aerospace Original Equipment Manufacturer to develop a technique to take the technology from Technology Readiness Level 3 to 6. In addition, TWI has been involved in several large UK and European collaborative partnerships to develop laser additive manufacturing techniques for aerospace production applications. A significant amount of underlying R&D work has also been carried out within TWI’s Core Research Programme, and a selection of work from these areas will be presented at this seminar.

This presentation will also review other additive manufacturing developments at TWI such as cold spray. TWI installed a state-of-the-art, commercial cold spray system in 2007 at its Yorkshire facility, and there are current TWI programmes that are developing techniques for material build up by spray forming including:

• Exploratory research project on nozzle design for improved Ni superalloy deposition.
• Exploratory research project on spray-forming in Ti, Ti alloys.