What is it about?

Additive manufacturing (also known as 3D printing) promises to change the manufacturing landscape. It has advantages associated with time to product realization, component repair, shortening supply chains, and costs. However, the properties must also be comparable (or exceed) those of conventional processing. Microstructure governs properties. This paper is a fundamental review of the physical details associated with additive manufacturing, and how it influences microstructure (and by extension, properties).

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Why is it important?

This article is a critical review of the literature - not only recent literature related to additive manufacturing, but also relevant fundamental literature on solidification, elemental species flux at liquid gas interfaces, and phase transformations. The article provides a framework to understand the evolution of composition and microstructure in additively manufactured metallic materials.

Perspectives

Although I have been involved in additive manufacturing for an extensive period of time (including my dissertation work on the first commercial sale of an Optomec LENS™ system), I had not had the opportunity to conduct such a thorough review. In the process of preparing the article, I have been able to better understand many of the subtleties of additive manufacturing that I have seen over the years, and hope this will help other researchers get a 'jump start' on relating fundamentals to this very exciting new set of processing techniques. It is also my hope that this can help others understand microstructural anomalies, and end up controlling their alloy chemistry and processing to achieve desired microstructures and therefore properties.

Prof. Peter C Collins
Iowa State University

Read the Original

This page is a summary of: Microstructural Control of Additively Manufactured Metallic Materials, Annual Review of Materials Science, July 2016, Annual Reviews,
DOI: 10.1146/annurev-matsci-070115-031816.
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