Control of Powder and Process Variations for a Robust and Repeatable Metal Additive Manufacturing

Research Project, 2018 – 2021

Additive Manufacturing (AM) is expanding manufacturing capabilities and opens up for innovative product solutions that offering reduced costs through reduced supply chain, less material waste (98%), shorter lead time and time-to-market. One of the largest challenges in AM is material and process robustness as well as their interaction and impact on the final repeatability, which also is the focus of ROAR-AM. The high sensitivity of output product characteristics to variations in process, material and design parameters remains and prevents its full-scale industrial implementation both in Sweden as well as internationally. The goal of ROAR-AM is to (i) understand how powder properties and their variations correlate with AM part characteristics, and how process parameters settings can be designed to still be able to fulfil simultaneously mechanical and dimensional requirements of the AM products. (ii) As different AM-machines have their characteristics, also different AM-systems will be evaluated herein. This will be translated into an industrial guide line for laser metal powder bed processes including a (iii) statistical approach to predict and contain those variations into tolerated intervals defining the robustness of AM. In ROAR-AM we will focus on medium- to high carbon tool steels for tough applications.