According to Professor Roger Reed, who is leading the research, the very rapid heating and cooling processes that occur during additive manufacturing (AM) can strongly the materials microstructure and its resultant mechanical properties,
The team have developed what they call an ‘alloy-by-design’ methodology which uses computational tools to screen different elemental compositions and explore the relationship between their chemistry and material properties. According to the University, this allows researchers to navigate more possible alloy compositions, enabling them to select the best candidates for production and physical testing and potentially design whole new alloy systems for AM.
An important part of the process is to be able to validate these numerical models quickly with high throughput physical testing, the researchers said. To do this Roger and the team at Oxford used an indentation plastometer from testing specialist Plastometrex, which can measure accurate material strength (in the form of stress-strain curves) from an automated three-minute indentation test. According to Plastometrex, this can reduce testing times and materials required for testing by over 90%.
