Event Date
Additive Manufacturing as a Unique Platform for Fabrication of (Meta-) Materials with Complex Topologies and Designer Microstructures.
Additive Manufacturing (AM) is a family of disruptive technologies that allow rapid fabrication of parts of nearly arbitrary geometrical complexity without the need of expensive tooling, vastly simplifying production of elaborate assemblies for a wide range of industries. The established approach to materials design for additive manufacturing (AM) generally consists of attempting to reproduce the uniform structures and properties of conventionally processed materials. While this certainly helped facilitate material certification and rapid introduction of AM technologies in a number of industries, the opportunity to exploit the fundamentally local nature of AM processes to fabricate novel heterogeneous materials with accurately controlled distributions of properties remains largely untapped. Here we discuss two recent and exciting demonstration of this new AM-enabled design concept: (a) novel shell-based architected materials with topological disorder spanning multiple length-scales, and (b) metal/metal architected composites produced by Laser Powder Bed Fusion of stainless steel with locally tailorable microstructure and phase distributions.