Rapid Qualification Methods for Powder Bed Direct Metal AM Processes

This talk gives an overview of an on-going project supported by America Makes (the National Additive Manufacturing Innovation Institute) that directly targets missing links for understanding and controlling microstructure and mechanical properties across both laser powder bed (EOS) and electron beam powder bed (Arcam) processes.  Establishing these links is key to qualifying these processes for use in the aerospace and other industries.  The project is a collaboration among 5 universities, 5 companies and 2 national laboratories.  This talk will summarize the structure of the program, where deposition experiments are being performed on each process, and their results captured in the form of process maps for melt pool geometry and microstructure.  Numerical models are guiding the mapping procedures.  Mechanical property tests are then performed on deposited samples.  Test geometries range from single beads to commonly deposited features to target components supplied by industry.  First results will be presented, identifying ranges of Ti64 melt pool geometries and solidification microstructures obtainable via each process.  Qualitative and quantitative comparisons will be made between the processes.