MRI: Acquisition of a metal additive manufacturing system for multi-disciplinary research and education

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This Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) award provides funding to acquire a metal additive manufacturing (AM) system for research and education. The instrumentation will enable researchers to develop new knowledge on the production of metals with high fracture and fatigue resistance, which are needed for the biomedical, defense, aerospace, and automotive industries. The instrumentation will also catalyze research advances in novel on-demand design of metamaterials for acoustic cloaking, biomedical imaging, and health monitoring. The metal AM system will enrich graduate and undergraduate education, support outreach activities at K-12 schools, and aid teacher workshops. A new virtual reality metal AM teaching module will be developed and made available for engineering students, high-school students, and the public. Research findings will also provide the basis for a new machine learning and computational mechanics class. The requested metal AM system will provide structural information on defects and pores that can be processed at the micro- and meso-scale, providing insights into the processing limits of the SLM system. A new SPH model will be developed to understand the powder-level physics during the SLM process; thus, advancing fundamental understanding of the structure development during the SLM of hierarchical metals. Neutron diffraction will be used to reveal the processing/structure effects on the residual stresses in hierarchical SLMed metals. Mechanical behavior of the hierarchical metals will be observed via tensile and fracture toughness tests. Using this new processing-structure-property information, FEM simulations will be performed to discover the origins of hierarchical toughening mechanisms in SLMed metals.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.