Auburn University accelerates metal 3D printing for aerospace and maritime defense

Industrial metal 3D printing is gaining increasing importance for safety-critical applications, but it often reaches its limits when it comes to qualification and material data. Two new partnerships are now strengthening the role of Auburn University in this field. Researchers at the National Center for Additive Manufacturing Excellence, known as NCAME, are working both with the powder manufacturer Amaero and with the shipbuilder Austal USA to significantly shorten development cycles in metal additive manufacturing.

The collaboration with Amaero focuses on evaluating high-performance materials such as Nb-C103 and Ti-6Al-4V for aerospace-related applications. Nb-C103 is attractive for high-temperature components due to its extremely high melting point, but it is also expensive and difficult to access.

“Nb-C103 applications are associated with extreme heat as it has very high melting temperatures compared to Ni-based superalloys,” said NCAME research engineer Scot Carpenter. “We’ve developed a high-throughput, iterative process development approach allowing Amaero to provide NCAME with minimal material and get a quick picture of the process-structure-property relationships. The target is for us to be able to turn this around in a matter of weeks so that the next iteration isn’t slowed by the need to send samples out to multiple laboratories to assess these relationships. The enabler here is that NCAME has the full fabrication to data value chain within our control, enabling us to expedite the printing, testing and characterization to meet the needs of the AM industry.”

“Amaero moves very fast and decisively in response to market needs for both small and large volume powder orders,” Eric Bono, Amaero chief technology officer, said. “NCAME served as an extension of our development team and was able to execute programs that generated printing parameters and mechanical properties faster than many commercial companies can do.”

This is made possible by full coverage of the process chain—from manufacturing through testing to characterization—within a single laboratory.

“Additive manufacturing offers many solutions to our nation’s industrial capacity but this can be diminished by having to engage multiple specialized laboratories to fully evaluate the process-structure-property relationships,” said Nima Shamsaei, Phillips WestPoint Distinguished Professor and Director of NCAME. “This partnership specifically leverages NCAME’s expertise and capabilities to provide answers within weeks, as opposed to months or years if outsourced.”

Austal USA is using the collaboration with NCAME to establish additive manufacturing processes as an alternative to cast and forged parts with lead times of up to two years.

The aim is to build statistically robust material property datasets—so-called material allowables—for structural AM components.

“The ultimate goal of this project is to establish the correlation between in-situ sensing data and the resulting defect/micro-structure,” said Connor Headley, research engineer for Austal USA.

“We’re assisting Austal USA in building up material allowables, which are statistically derived data sets of mechanical properties for materials of interest,” Carpenter said.

“Our applied research division within NCAME allows us to provide tremendous value to the end use case, establishing specification minimums for AM parts, while also exploring how these conventional validation approaches can be improved upon with modern manufacturing techniques such as in-process monitoring,” Shamsaei said.

The combination of process monitoring, material data, and rapid iteration could therefore further push the use of 3D printing in aerospace and shipbuilding toward series production.