New Developments in High Deposition Rate Metal AM Processes

Additive manufacturing with lasers (LAM) and electron beam additive manufacturing (EBAM) using powder beds are well known and moving along a path to flight qualification, as is electron beam with wire (EB FFF)  Other potential fully additive (CAD to part) processes, such as arc welding, or full AM processes such as very high power ultrasonic additive manufacturing (VHP/UAM), are being studied and are on the path to full flight qualification.  The available AM processes range from those, like the laser and EB powder bed processes, producing very fine detail part features at deposition rates as low as 20 hrs/lb, to those producing large deposits at 20 lbs/hr, or more usng EB FFF.  There is a lot of ‘trade space’ in between that has really not been explored to a significant degree.  This presentation summarizes recent work conducted using arc welding processes and VHP/UAM for common titanium and nickel based alloys.  Arc Welding processes addressed include gas tungsten arc welding with hot wire feed (GTAW-HW),plasma arc welding (PAW) and gas metal arc welding with hot wire.  The former arc welding processes, with suitable inert gas shielding, offer the opportunity to meet property requirements at much more affordable cost than offered by EB and LAM. These processes are suited to producing structural components with expectations of fully machineing the parts after build.

VHP/UAM is a new, higher power, version of the UAM process providing up to 6 times more power and ten times more down force than offered by prior commercially available equipment.  The VHP UAM process has been fully commercialized and been evaluated for nickel and titanium alloys as well as aerospace aluminum alloys.  This presentation will summarize the current state of the art for this new variant.