A New High Performance Al Material Concept for Additive Manufactured Aerospace Components

Additive manufacturing technologies like laser or electron beam assisted powder melting have become great attention in the aerospace community because these direct manufacturing concepts enable a late "design freeze" and very rapid deployment of complex and topology optimized parts. For the time being most of those parts had been manufactured from titanium and stainless steel alloys due to its very favorably welding and related strength behaviour. Requests on additively manufactured parts built up from Al-alloys suffered mostly on the low (specific) strength because commonly used AlSi (like 4047) or AlSiMg-materials display a intrinsic metallurgy which suits not very good to direct metal built up concepts. EADS innovation Work has developed an Al-material which benefits perfectly from the rapid solidification during laser melting and creates more than 500 MPa engineering strength after precipitation hardening treatment. Furthermore this medium tempered annealing step can be performed under pressure (hot isostatic pressing (HIP)) healing remaining small unavoidable internal voids after running the built up process. Consequently static and dynamic strength properties are significantly improved making the material a viable option against classical well established 7xxx plate material design solution