Ti-6Al-4V has been widely used in both the biomedical and aerospace industry, due to its high strength, corrosion resistance, high fracture toughness and light weight. Additive manufacturing (AM) is an attractive method of Ti-6Al-4V parts' fabrication, as it provides a low waste alternative for complex geometries. With continued progress being made in SLM technology, the influence of build layers, grain boundaries and defects can be combined to improve further the design process and allow the fabrication of components with improved static and fatigue strength in critical loading directions. To initiate this possibility, the mechanical properties, including monotonic, low and high cycle fatigue and fracture mechanical behaviour, of machined as-built SLM Ti-6Al-4V, have been critically reviewed in order to inform the research community. The corresponding crystallographic phases, defects and layer orientations have been analysed to determine the influence of these features on the mechanical behaviour. This review paper intends to enhance our understanding of how these features can be manipulated and utilised to improve the fatigue resistance of components fabricated from Ti-6Al-4V using the SLM technology.

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The aerospace industry is widely employing strain-life methodologies for structural fatigue predictions. Under spectrum loading, overloads significantly affect the fatigue, therefore it is very important to accurately account for the cyclic transient deformation phenomena. Describing these phenomena requires advanced plasticity models that involve a set of material parameters. Even for the well-known Chaboche model, there is lack of understanding of each parameter's sensitivity

The creep life and deformation behaviour of high-temperature steels can be significantly affected by the prior plastic loading. This effect is partly due to the generation of intergranular strains from the grain-scale elastic and plastic anisotropic deformation during plastic loading. This paper investigates the effect of these plasticity generated intergranular strains on the subsequent creep strain accumulation behavior in type 316H stainless steel. An in-situ synchrotron diffraction experiment was conducted at 550°C, where the sample was loaded incrementally to different magnitudes of plastic strain, followed by a displacement-controlled stress relaxation dwell at each of this stage. The lattice strains of 4 grain families were measured during these stages. It was found that the intergranular strains generated during the plastic deformation significantly affect the relative magnitude of creep strain accumulation in different grain families. A subtle but significant difference has been observed between the creep intergranular strain accumulation behavior and the plastic intergranular strain accumulation behavior in different grain families which can be used to interrogate the validity of any micromechanical models’ formulation for creep and plastic deformation. The macroscopic stress relaxations measured from the experiment were compared with the prediction from a novel crystal plasticity based micromechanical model developed in our group. A good overall match was found between the experiment and the model regarding the magnitude of stress relaxation after various level of plasticity. The experiments have demonstrated that the model requires further development to accurately predict the rate of stress relaxation and the micro scale lattice strain evolution during creep.

Crystal plasticity finite element (CPFE) modelling is an effective tool from which detailed information on the meso-scale behaviour of crystalline metallic systems can be extracted and used, not only to enhance the understanding of material behaviour under different loading conditions, but also to improve the structural integrity assessment of engineering components. To be of full benefit however it must be demonstrated to not only predict the average global response of the material, but also the local behaviour, to provide insight into localised regions of stress and plastic strain. In this study, a slip system based constitutive model is developed to improve the simulation capability of time independent and time dependent plasticity. Comparison has been made between the macro-mechanical behaviour predicted by the model and previous experiments carried out at engineering length scale. Critically, the macromechanical behaviour predicted by the model has been examined against the behaviour of the materials at the meso-scale crystalline level measured by previous diffraction experiments. The robustness of the model is demonstrated on both the macro-and meso-scale through the successful prediction of macro-scale behaviour and lattice strain evolution under a variety of loading conditions. The model not only effectively recognised the influence of prior deformation on subsequent loading, but also complemented neutron diffraction data to enrich the understanding of the influence of an important loading condition on the deformation of grains within the material.

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