Overview on printability of metals and alloys

Abstract

Digitalization of the manufacturing industry is happening in every sector whether it is smart manufacturing, automation, additive manufacturing, use of sensors to monitor the manufacturing process, inventory, and logistics. This era is going to change the way manufacturing happens. Manufacturing will be more predictive, time-efficient and cost-effective. In many manufacturing processes, a particular metal might not be an ideal choice for printing or additive manufacturing process due to defects produced during the process. Some of these defects include composition change, lack of fusion, residual stresses, and distortion. The ability of an alloy to avoid these effects is termed as printability of metals. With the prolonged use of Additive Manufacturing(AM) as a manufacturing process, it becomes important to analyse and gather data about the printability of these alloys with different Additive Manufacturing techniques to make them more time-efficient and cost-effective. The printability data offers us beforehand knowledge to select additive manufacturing processes for a particular metal to give the best quality possible and thus save time. In this article overview of Metal Additive Manufacturing and printability of metal is provided.