Materials | Mechanics | Manufacturing
Additive manufacturing processes can introduce numerous microstructural features such as porosity, internal interfaces, or variations in crystallinity into a material that can strongly influence mechanical response and failure. Microstructural characterization is therefore critical to improving processing and understanding material properties.
Additively manufactured materials can exhibit complex mechanical behavior. Issues such as anisotropy, size effects, rate-dependence and non-linear response must be measured experimentally.
Constitutive models that accurately capture complex material behavior are a necessity for successful finite element analysis (FEA) of additively manufactured parts.
With the increasing part complexity enabled by AM comes a greater need to rely upon finite element analysis to predict part performance and failure.
Additive manufacturing offers engineers the opportunity to fabricate virtually any shape. Topology optimization helps engineers efficiently explore the design space they are working in and find solutions.
Additive manufacturing enables the fabrication of lattice and cellular structures which can provide exceptional performance in areas such as energy absorption or stiffness-to-weight ratio.
Root cause analysis is needed when additively manufactured parts fail unexpectedly during development or in service. Successful failure analysis can require experimental and computational methods to evaluate different failure modes such as fatigue, fracture, overload, and material deficiency.