Metal Additive Manufacturing: Challenges and Opportunities

Metal Additive Manufacturing (MAM) is a rapidly expanding technology that enables the production of intricate parts while reducing time and material usage. It also allows for the fabrication of large items, which are already actively used in the aerospace industry. MAM provides unique material characteristics that exceed the properties of comparable materials produced by conventional techniques. However, due to the high temperatures and high cooling rates, metals and alloys produced through this process possess specific characteristics such as elongated structures along the building direction, fine substructures, strong residual stress, and defects like pores or unmelted powder particles. It limits the direct application of the well-known alloy compositions for MAM. At the same time, MAM provides unique possibilities for material manipulations: building functionally graded materials; in situ printing (e.g., printing using a mixture of elemental powders); printing in the nitrogen atmosphere allowing the material nitridation, etc. All of this open the opportunities for MAM applications requiring the precise understanding of the printed material properties.   The talk will provide a general overview of MAM technologies, explaining the advantages and challenges of each, and will also highlight the main recent directions for MAM applications.