Adaptive Microstructure-Based Approach for Rapid Qualification by Similarity of Ti-6Al-4V Parts Manufactured by Additive Manufacturing (AM) Techniques

Qualification of metallic materials is a crucial, yet arduous, step towards reliable insertion of new materials and processing technologies. This process relies on standardization and comprehensive characterization in order to gain confidence in the reliability of materials performance. Metallic additive manufacturing technologies offer unprecedented flexibility to tailor processing conditions, microstructure, and even chemistry in a location-specific manner, while also enabling previously infeasible optimized geometries. However, this novelty inherently leads to macroscale heterogeneity and uncertainties of location specific properties that make it difficult to use traditional test samples to qualify AM parts or processes. Consequently, MRL proposes a novel approach to qualify parts by inspecting witness samples that uses location specific microstructures to record processing variables by building them in synchronization with the part. The novelty of the technique is in the design of the witness samples to clone the microstructures and properties of critical volumes within the parts (internal or external).