Additive manufacturing and new materials

Additive manufacturing (AM) is an emerging technology enabling sustainable manufacturing and digital industrial transformation. AM methods do open doors to the design and synthesis of new materials having chemical compositions and phases that are impossible in conventional materials. This technology, nonetheless, brings up new challenges for researchers as the additively manufactured materials often have a non-equilibrium microstructure, contain metastable phases, and possess a new set of properties different from the standard. Understanding the influence of manufacturing parameters on microstructure formation processes, and further the influence of microstructure on properties of AM materials is a task for modern materials scientists.

Additive manufacturing research at KAU originated from the international collaboration with EU universities and an EU Regional Development Fund sponsored project “AT-LAB - Regional additive manufacturing laboratory at Karlstad University”, for more details see:
ATLAB

Currently, the AT-LAB research agenda is expanded and covers research questions from micro- to macro-level. The AT-LAB / Additive manufacturing group carries out research on powder bed fusion manufacturing (PBF-L/M) focusing on the formation of microstructure, design of new alloys, printability tests, optimization of parameters; (ii) performs investigations of microstructure and static and dynamic mechanical properties including wear and very-high cycle fatigue tests of materials manufactured by a variety of AM methods (PBF, DED, BJ, etc.); carries out component related research focusing on design optimization and topology optimization of AM components for example a light-weigh design with incorporated graded lattice structures. Recent interest, in collaboration with DAMI 4.0 we carry out some activities on the implementation of machine learning and artificial intelligence in powder bed fusion process monitoring, online quality control, image analysis for microstructure quality assessment.