Ames Laboratory, Iowa, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Tenn., have been awarded $5 million from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Manufacturing Office to improve the production and composition of metal alloy powders for additive manufacturing.
“A lot of intense interest is focused on additive manufacturing with metal alloys, because there are so many potential applications,” says ASM Fellow Iver Anderson, who is project leader and senior metallurgist at Ames Lab, as well as adjunct professor in Materials Science and Engineering at Iowa State. “Industry has demands for prototyping parts, design development, reducing waste of expensive materials, and efficiently producing custom and legacy components for their customers.”
Because metal alloy powders are the raw materials for additive manufacturing, the ability to control the properties and quality of those powders becomes paramount to the quality of the final product. The goal is to achieve properties equal to those of cast and machined parts, or especially cast/forged and machined parts.
“Today, if engineers went to metal powder producers with a shopping list of the alloys and powder specifications needed, they very likely would not find what they want,” says Prof. Anderson. “The customization capabilities are just not there, and we need to get there. That is going to be the key to commercially competitive additive manufacturing processes.”
The goal of the project is to improve powder production by improving the high-pressure gas atomization process pioneered at Ames. Engineers and scientists will design and customize alloys specifically for additive manufacturing processes. Modeling and simulation of gas atomization process stages will be based on a flow-simulation code developed by the National Energy Technology Laboratory for part of the work.
Experimental gas atomization work and alloy design calculations/verification also will be done in the powder synthesis facilities at Ames. Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Manufacturing Demonstration Facility (ORNL-MDF) will conduct the corresponding additive manufacturing experiments.
