CAREER: Power Field Control to Prescribe Full Temperature History in Powder Bed Fusion

This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award supports research that aims to investigate an innovative power field control strategy to achieve prescribed thermal histories throughout a part in powder bed fusion additive manufacturing. The metal powder bed fusion market, projected to grow by 683 million USD by 2027, has about 25 percent of its market share in the aerospace and defense sectors, where qualification and certification are critical factors for its adoption in manufacturing.

The qualification and certification approach typically takes years and costs millions of dollars. A key obstacle in the workflow is the presence of a process-induced location-specific variation of the thermal history during conventional additive manufacturing processing. This affects the microstructure, defects, and properties of the material.

The findings from this project are expected to enable the design of novel processing pathways to prescribe desired thermal history in the part and tailor properties. If successful, this approach will fully utilize the processing possibilities offered by the open architecture powder bed fusion additive manufacturing machines and break the conventional processing paradigms.

The integrated education and outreach plan aims to address the current, emerging, and future manufacturing workforce needs through training machine operators, integrating research findings into graduate and advanced undergraduate curricula, and via summer camps for K-12 students.

This CAREER research project aims to investigate an innovative power field control strategy to achieve prescribed thermal histories throughout the part in powder bed fusion additive manufacturing. This will be accomplished via research that attempts to address the following objectives: (1) Understand the effects of power field control on porosity and microstructure, including solidification and solid-state transformations, and (2) Evaluate the effectiveness of power field control in decoupling thermal history from part geometry.

The experimental tasks leverage powder bed fusion-electron beam process to demonstrate control over final microstructure and mechanical property in the part. The tasks are organized to design power fields for achieving a target thermal history by utilizing in-situ process monitoring and characterization to evaluate the effectiveness in maintaining consistent part quality irrespective of the part geometry.

The generated knowledge could advance other fields including, manufacturing process planning and control, process monitoring, and multi-scale material characterization.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.