UW-Madison leading ONR-funded project to improve additive manufacturing technology

The University of Wisconsin-Madison is leading a new $9.1 million project funded by the U.S. Office of Naval Research that aims to enable broader usage of additive manufacturing technologies, especially in fabrication of mission-critical components.

Mechanical Engineering Professor Xiaoping Qian is the lead principal investigator on the project, which includes UW-Madison mechanical engineering faculty Curt Bronkhorst, Lianyi Chen, Shiva Rudraraju, Krishnan Suresh and Jinlong Wu. Researchers from GE Aerospace Research, GE Additive and Intact Solutions are also participating in the project.

An additive manufacturing technology called laser powder bed fusion can produce parts with complex geometries, but there is significant variability in dimensional accuracy, microstructures, porosity, residual stress and fatigue life in these parts. Such part-to-part and machine-to-machine variability has impeded effective and efficient qualification of additive manufactured parts, which has hampered adoption of these technologies.

The goal of this project is to develop computational methods for efficient qualification of additive manufactured parts and to exploit mechanical property variability in additive manufacturing, such as changes in microstructures and porosity, as increased design freedom for process-part co-design. Such process-part co-design will essentially treat process variability as a feature instead of an obstacle in quality control. The researchers aim to simultaneously optimize process control variables, part geometry and material properties in which material properties will be varied through additive manufacturing process control. This research is expected to lead to increased part performance and ease additive manufacturing process control.

Xiaoping Qian is the Elmer R. and Janet Ambach Kaiser Professor, Krishnan Suresh is a Mead Witter Foundation Professor, and Lianyi Chen is the Charles Ringrose Associate Professor.