Accelerated Development of Advanced High Strength Light Weight Alloys for Selective Laser Melting Process

Purpose and goal

In metal additive manufacturing (AM) the material diversity is limited. This is a consequence of high costs associated with alloy development which is traditionally heavily reliant on trial and error. The purpose of this study was to evaluate a novel methodology for the accelerated development of new alloys for metal AM processes. To this end, the Integrated Computational Materials Engineering (ICME) approach was used to find a new high strength aluminium alloy tailored for selective laser melting processing. A completely new aluminium composition was designed and evaluated.

Expected results and effects

A new aluminium alloy intended for the SLM process was computationally designed to have a good combination of strength and printability. The proposed composition is based on the Al-Cu-Mg system. A simple methodology based on welding trials was devised and applied in order to evaluate the printability of the new alloy in comparison with commercial aluminium alloys. This new methodology can be used in the initial phase of powder development and provides a simple and economic way to rank the printability of different alloys, without the need for producing powder.

Planned approach and implementation

The printability of the new alloy was determined by simple welding trials. To this end, the new alloy was produced by sand casting and several welding investigations were performed on the alloy in order to determine its printability/weldability. In terms of printability/weldability and strength, the new composition was compared with a number of commercial aluminium alloys such as AlSi10Mg and 7075. The results indicate that the new composition is worthy of further development and optimization. The project consortium consisted of RISE IVF, QuesTek Eruope and Höganäs.