Mechanical properties of thin wall specimens produced by additive manufacturing methods

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Additive manufacturing (AM) technology involves printing a component using a laser or electron beam to melt specific locations in a 'bed' of powder of the material of choice, which then solidifies into a layer of the component; the three dimensional (3D) component is then built up layer by layer. The powders have particle diameters in the size range of tens of microns, which means the thickness of each layer is also of the order of tens of microns. In addition, AM is an environmentally friendly technology because it minimizes materials wastage and has the ability to combine a lot of different components into one complex part; this simplifies assembly and reduces the number of spare parts that need to be stored. However, a complex part will incorporate wildly different thicknesses and one of the problems will be that, for the same AM processing conditions, the properties of a component will vary strongly with section thicknesses. The specific problem we are tackling is to determine the influence of powder 'characteristics' (e.g. size, shape) and processing conditions (e.g. beam type, melting power) on the mechanical properties of additive manufacturing powder bed fusion (AM-PBF) printed specimens in the range of 1.0 mm thick. The success of printing these so-called 'thin wall' specimens with desired mechanical properties will massively increase the incorporation of AM in industry. In order to achieve this goal, this research boasts very strong industrial support from AP &C, a metal powder company that has been developing a very strong AM strategy with AM equipment suppliers and manufacturing companies. The research will be performed by academic researchers at McGill University, which will train the technologically advanced manpower required to exploit AM. This work will be led by Professor Stephen Yue, who has been involved in AM research since 2007, and Dr. Javier Arreguin Zavala, who is the senior material project manager in AP&C and in charge of the development of special projects.