Deployment of New High Performance Al, Ti and Fe-Based Alloys in Additive Manufacturing

Much of the research in Additive Manufacturing (AM) has focused on a relatively small set of legacy and commodity alloys, such as stainless steel, Ti-6-4, and castable Al alloys. Often, the same alloy chemistry and standard heat treatment practices developed for forged bar are used, resulting in material performance issues.

There is growing interest in modifying the alloy chemistries and heat treatments, and in designing entirely new alloys tailored for AM processing in order to maximize material and component performance.

This talk will provide recent project updates to design, develop and deploy novel high performance Al, Ti and Fe alloys for Additive Manufacturing processes, leveraging an Integrated Computational Materials Engineering (ICME) approach and showing improvement over current commodity alloys.

Specific AM development project updates to be reviewed include: (i) Mechanical property data for three new ICME-designed Al alloys tailored for AM processes for use at room temperature, elevated temperatures above 200C and in corrosive environments; (ii) Static and fatigue properties of a series of Ti alloys that have shown ~15% increase in strength vs. Ti-6Al-4V printed using Sciaky, Norsk and powder bed processes; and (iii) High performance Ferrium C64 carburizable steel for gear, tool and die and other applications that require high strength, high toughness and high surface hardness and will cover both static and fatigue properties.