Philosophical Magazine Letters

For thousands of years we have been fashioning 3D items from metal alloys, principally using the processes of casting, forging and machining. These processes are possible in the analogue world, but suffer from severe limitations – for example those on complexity, internal features, and alloy selection. Today additive manufacturing is an additional synthesis route in our tool-box, made possible by digitalisation of product design, advances in technology and extensions to our knowledge of the underpinning metallurgical fundamentals such as rapid solidification.

Additive manufacturing has become more sophisticated, and has reached the very forefront of human understanding of the behavior of metal alloys under conditions of very rapid heating and cooling, melting, re-solidification, and solid state phase transformations. For powder bed fusion processes, control of powder synthesis and flow is also difficult. The result is that many AM parts suffer from defects, or non-optimal microstructure and properties. In this focused edition of PML, we will explore some of the important research that is being done to expand the frontiers of relevant metallurgical and process knowledge. AM provides vast quantities of data, and Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning techniques can serve to accelerate and improve the outcomes of research in this environment.

Topics to be covered by the Article Collection include, but are not limited to, alloy design for AM, powder production, powder handling and spreading, AM machine design including heat source optimization, raster pattern and hatch spacing for laser or e-beam, melt pool dynamics, high velocity solidification of alloys in large thermal gradients, thermodynamic metastability of 3D printed alloys, formation, reduction or elimination of defects, microstructural evolution, properties of printed material and performance of parts. Contributions are welcome which cover experimental investigations, theory, computational modelling or data science.

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