Publications

In this work, scratch and nanoindentation testing was used to determine hardness, fracture toughness, strain rate sensitivity, and activation volumes on additively manufactured graded and uniform Ni-Nb bulk specimens. Characterization showed the presence of a two phase system consisting of Ni₃Nb and Ni₆Nb₇ intermetallics. Intermetallics were multimodal in nature, having grain and cell sizes spanning from a few nanometers to 10s of micrometers. The unique microstructure resulted in impressively high hardness, up to 20 GPa in the case of the compositionally graded sample. AM methods with surface deformation techniques are a useful way to rapidly probe material properties and alloy composition space.

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The fatigue strength of additively manufactured metallic parts in their as-built surface condition is mainly dominated by the surface roughness. Post-processing is often inevitable to reduce surface roughness effects even though post-processing diminishes the main advantage of additive manufacturing, which is net-shaped direct-to-service production. This study investigates the underlying mechanisms responsible for fatigue failure of additively manufactured 304L stainless steel parts in as-built and machined/polished surface conditions. Both strain- and force-controlled, fully reversed fatigue tests were conducted to gain a comprehensive understanding of surface roughness effects on fatigue behavior. The sensitivity to surface roughness is shown to be dependent on the control mode, with stress-based fatigue tests showing greater sensitivity than strain-based fatigue tests. Moreover, the fatigue life estimation for as-built specimens was performed based on surface roughness parameters as well as the fatigue properties of the specimens in machined/polished surface condition of the material without using any fatigue data of specimens in as-built surface condition. Accordingly, the effect of surface roughness on the fatigue behavior could be estimated reasonably well in both strain-life and stress-life approaches.

The potential advantages of AM (e.g. weight reduction, novel geometries) are well understood within a systems context. However, adoption of AM at the system level has been slow due to the relative uncertainty in the final material properties, which leaves capabilities and/or performance gains unrealized. Utilizing remelt strategies it may be possible to expand the available process window to provide densities and microstructures beyond what is capable with standard scan strategies. This work explored remelting strategies for 316L stainless steel to tailor grain size and increase density. Twelve scan strategies were explored experimentally and computationally to understand the limitations of remelt strategies and the robustness of the current simulation package. Results show tailoring of grain size, density, and texture is achievable through remelting and several key lessons learned were made to improve the texture evaluation through simulation.

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