Tailorable steel microstructures using electron beam powder bed fusion
This project focuses on materials design of steels for additive manufacturing (AM). More specific on processes enabling the production of components with complex geometries without requiring welding to join separate parts, and a related open-source E-PBF platform.
Background
Conventional manufacturing methods like welding can fall short for steel fabrication, sometimes creating weak areas susceptible to cracking. Instead, AM processes, including electron beam powder bed fusion (E-PBF), give us the ability to produce components with complex geometries without requiring welding to join separate parts. Furthermore, an open-source E-PBF platform like the Freemelt ONE allows us full control over the E-PBF process parameters. This level of control presents many new opportunities for creating precisely tailored microstructures with properties optimized toward a given application and is a necessity to fully integrate materials design into the ongoing process and component design work underway in other IRIS projects.
Aims and objectives
Project plan
Applied interdisciplinarity
AM is inherently interdisciplinary. From the creation of an AM platform to producing a final component requires input from metallurgists, mechanical engineers, physicists, computer scientists, and others. Our study of the different steel microstructures that we can produce via E-PBF can directly inform further manufacturing and process and component design work.
KTH collaborations
Prof. Chris Hulme Smith from MSE
Production Engineering, Material Science and Engineering
Duration
August 2021 – August 2023
Project participants
