Towards rapid qualification of powder-bed laser additively manufactured parts

Abstract

Qualification of aerospace components is a long and costly process involving material properties, material specifications, manufacturing process, and design among others. Reducing qualification time and cost while maintaining safety offers a large economic advantage and enables faster response to the market demands. In 2012, DARPA established the Open Manufacturing program, a project to develop an integrated computational materials engineering (ICME) framework aimed at rapid qualification. Rapid qualification requires the integration of several technologies: materials, process, design, models, monitoring and control, non-destructive evaluation (NDE), testing, among others. A probabilistic design approach is adopted in the rapid qualification process to enable the integration of these technologies into a single risk-based function to optimize the design process. This approach directs the efforts to those areas that play the most important roles, potentially reducing specimen testing that will be required to develop material databases and design limits. New tests also will be required to validate and verify the ICME framework and develop a better understanding of the processing-microstructure-property relation and associated variability of the processing conditions. The probabilistic design approach is demonstrated for the rapid qualification of an actual aircraft engine component constructed via the powder-bed additive manufacturing process. This paper summarizes the probabilistic rapid qualification design approach and its application to this novel manufacturing process with the goal of reducing the overall qualification process time by 40 % and qualification process cost by 20 %.

Influence of Powder Bed Characteristics on Material Quality in Additive Manufacturing

“…The irregularities can be correlated with how the particles were arranged; leading to non-uniform capillary forces on both sizes of the laser track. This behaviour is in agreement with high speed camera images reported in literature [11,12].…”

A Design for Qualification Framework for the Development of Additive Manufacturing Components—A Case Study from the Space Industry

“…AM process modelling tools and process in-situ inspection are suggested to be an important part of future process development and control [17]. Although promising, these tools are still in their infancy and require further development and demonstration [65,66]. Future qualification approaches could hence have increased dependence of process modelling and in-situ inspection, which is not contradicted by the Design for Qualification framework.…”

A Metal Powder Bed Fusion Process in Industry: Qualification Considerations

“…Moreover, in-situ process monitoring should be implemented, especially in the aerospace sector, for certification purposes, to provide evidence in the form of in-process quality assurance (IPQA ® ). A probabilistic design approach was adopted by Peralta et al [12] in a rapid qualification process to enable the integration of these aspects in a single risk-based function in order to optimize the design process. Simulation tools are used in the rapid qualification model to simultaneously analyze the product development phase, which is therefore not sequential but concurrent: The manufacturing, materials, and design are at the same level.…”