Speaker
Description
The multitude of extreme environments in nuclear, aerospace or other extreme environment applications pose a true challenge in materials selection. A combination of coupled extremes like radiation damage, corrosion, stress, temperature and activation concerns lead to the fact that only a rather limited number of materials are suitable for those environments. However, revisiting the materials selection approach and utilizing novel manufacturing capabilities like 3D metal printing has the potential to unify complicated shape and geometries with changing materials properties. Materials properties can be tailored either using laser processing and localized heat treatments or compositional variations during the processing. This presentation will cover the process of materials selection to gradient prints on several examples from a number of different applications and provide examples of how 3D metal printing can generate graded components either via heat treatments or compositional variation. We will show how print parameters and even component shape can change the outcome of the build to demonstrate that controlling the parameters may lead to tailored properties. High resolution EBSD in combination with mechanical testing reveals the effects of manufacturing condition on the performance and microstructure.