Purpose This paper aims to provide a comparison between the mechanical performance and microstructural aspects of stainless steel 17-4 PH processed using, respectively, two technologies: atomic diffusion additive manufacturing (ADAM) and metal fused filament fabrication (MFFF). Design/methodology/approach Different tensile specimens have been printed using an industrial system and a consumer three-dimensional (3D) printer, varying two main 3D printing parameters. Mechanical and microstructural tests are executed to make a comparison between these two technologies and two different feedstock material, to identify the main differences. Findings These 3D printing processes make parts with different surface quality, mechanical and microstructural properties. The parts, printed by the industrial system (ADAM), showed lower values of roughness, respect those produced using the 3D consumer printer (MFFF). The different sintering process parameters and the two debinding methods (catalytic or solvent based) affect the parts properties such as porosity, microstructure, grain size and amount of δ-ferrite. These proprieties are responsible for dissimilar tensile strength and hardness values. With the aim to compare the performances among traditional metal additive technology, MFFF and ADAM, a basic analysis of times and costs has been done. Originality/value The application of two metal extrusion techniques could be an alternative to other metal additive manufacturing technologies based on laser or electron beam. The low cost and printing simplicity are the main drivers of the replacements of these technologies in not extreme application fields.

The most relevant criticalities of parts produced by material extrusion additive manufacturing technologies are lower mechanical properties than standard material performances, the presence of pores caused by the manufacturing method, and issues related to the interface between layers and rods. In this context, heat treatments can be considered an effective solution for tailoring the material behavior to different application fields, especially when using precipitation hardening stainless steels. In this work, aging treatments were conducted on parts realized using three different extrusion-based processes: Atomic Diffusion Additive Manufacturing, bound metal deposition, and fused filament fabrication. Two conditions of direct aging (H900 and H1150) were considered with the aim of comparing the response of properties in the opposite conditions of peak-aged and overaged. The hardness tests revealed that H900 aging significantly influenced hardness (max increase of 52%), and porosity (− 34.3% with respect to the as-sintered condition). On the other hand, the H1150 aging decreased the hardness (− 18% max) and porosity (− 32.2% max). Substantial differences among the microstructures due to grain size and δ-ferrite were illustrated. A statistical test was included to better highlight the influence of the heat treatment on the investigated properties.

Additive Manufacturing (AM) is the fabrication of real three-dimensional objects from plastics and metals by adding material, layer by layer. One of the most common AM processes is the Material Extrusion (ME) based on different approaches: plunger, filament and screw. Material Extrusion technologies of metal-polymer composites is expanding and it mainly uses the filament or plunger-based approaches. The feedstock used is a mixture of metal powder (from 55 vol% to about 80 vol%) dispersed in a thermoplastic matrix, as the Metal Injection Molding (MIM) materials. The process consists of three steps: shaping, debinding and sintering. The first step provides the extrusion of filament to realize a primary piece called “green part”; subsequent steps, debinding and sintering, allow to obtain a full metal part by dissolving the polymeric binder. The latter can be carried out using solvents, heat and the combination of them. The interest toward this technology is driven by the possibility to replace other Metal AM technologies, such as Selective Laser Melting or Direct Energy Deposition, in sectors like rapid-tooling or mass production, with several benefits: simplicity, safety to use and saving material and energy. The aim of this keynote is to provide a general overview of the main metal ME technologies considering the more technical aspects such as process methodologies, 3D printing strategy, process parameters, materials and possible applications for the manufacturing of samples on a 3D consumer printer.

The large diffusion of shared-memory multi-core machines has impacted the way Parallel Discrete Event Simulation (PDES) engines are built. While they were originally conceived as data-partitioned platforms, where each thread is in charge of managing a subset of simulation objects, nowadays the trend is to shift towards share-everything settings. In this scenario, any thread can (in principle) take care of CPU-dispatching pending events bound to whichever simulation object, which helps to fully share the load across the available CPU-cores. Hence, a fundamental aspect to be tackled is to provide an efficient globally-shared pending events' set from which multiple worker threads can concurrently extract events to be processed, and into which they can concurrently insert new produced events to be processed in the future. To cope with this aspect, we present the design and implementation of a concurrent non-blocking pending events' set data structure, which can be seen as a variant of a classical calendar queue. Early experimental data collected with a synthetic stress test are reported, showing excellent scalability of our proposal on a machine equipped with 32 CPU-cores. CCS Concepts •Theory of computation → Data structures design and analysis; Shared memory algorithms; •Computing methodologies → Discrete-event simulation;

Recently, metals have been processed with fused filament fabrication (FFF) printers, in the form of mixture of metal powder and a polymeric binder. This new area of additive manufacturing is called metal-fused filament fabrication (metal FFF), and it is characterized by several advantages: low cost of manufacturing for small batches, ease of use, lower cost of energy and lower risks compared to the main metal additive manufacturing technologies. Being a novel technique, it is of great importance to understand the mechanical behaviour of the fabricated parts to reach the potential applications. In this work, the mechanical response of parts printed by metal FFF was analysed by means of digital image correlation (DIC) technique. This latter allowed to better highlight the anisotropic mechanical behaviour of the FFF parts when varying some 3D printing parameters, such as building orientation and number of wall layers and enabled a complete characterization of material useful for numerical calculation and finite element analysis. With this aim, 316L stainless steel filament and a consumer 3D printer were used for the fabrication of tensile test specimens. Three different building orientations and three different numbers of wall layers were evaluated. Results obtained from the tensile tests conducted with the DIC system highlighted the anisotropy of the strain behaviour when varying building orientation and printing strategy. More in details, flatwise and sideways configurations returned higher values of tensile strength, elongation at break and Poisson’s ratio compared to upright one, while the increase of number of wall layers, in some cases, caused a decrease of the mechanical properties.