Metal additive manufacturing, particularly Laser Powder Bed Fusion (LPBF), has become an indispensable part of today’s highly competitive product development and manufacturing production processes. It offers breakthrough capabilities in enabling high performance product design and unmatched producibility, but its industrialization process has been slow. The major holdback is inconsistency in product quality, production batch variation, and printer to printer variation. In the LPBF process, material’s property and parts dimensional accuracy are all evolved during the printing process. Although, post printing processes may improve and enhance them, but the initial printing has profound impact on defining what can be improved. On one hand, robust production level of success has been demonstrated for mission critical components on manned spaceflight but on the other hand reaching consistent quality is still a challenge in the metal 3D printing industries. The critical part for implementing an AM production strategy is ensuring a consistent and robust AM process capable of delivering high quality AM hardware that is well characterized and defects free. In this short course, an AM physical metallurgy based approach will cover from the process fundamental, impactful factors, process controls to achieve reliable and consistent product quality in the production manufacturing environments.
Learning Objectives:
- Participants will gain a comprehensive understanding of the core fundamental process of LPBF.
- Participants will understand impactful factors in achieve Qualified Metallurgical Process in AM production, development and optimize material performance.
- Participants will be able to evaluate and select the most fit AM processes for productions and advantages of AM process and apply it to mission critical applications.
