Design and Tailoring of Alloys for Additive Manufacturing

Additive manufacturing (AM) promises a major transformation for manufacturing of metallic components for aerospace, medical, nuclear, and energy applications. This perspective paper addresses some of the opportunities for alloy and feedstock design to achieve site-specific and enhanced properties not attainable by conventional manufacturing processes. This paper provides a brief overview of the role of powders, as well as solidification and solid-state phase transformation phenomena typically encountered during fusion-based AM. Three case studies are discussed that leverage the above to arrive at microstructure control. The first case study focuses on approaches to modify the solidification characteristics by in-situ alloying. The second case study focuses on the need for concurrent design of alloys and processing conditions to arrive at the columnar to equiaxed transition during solidification. The third case study focuses on the design of a cobalt alloy for AM, with emphasis on tailoring liquid and solid state phase transformations. The need for comprehensive knowledge of processing conditions during AM, in-situ and ex-situ probing of microstructure development under AM conditions, and post-print processing, characterization, and qualification are articulated for the design of future alloys and component geometries built by AM.