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1. Inexpensive Verification via Electromechanical Impedance for Additively Manufactured Parts

   S. M. Strutner, C. Tenney (January 2018, SAMPE Conference)

   Currently, verifying additively manufactured (AM) parts requires time consuming and expensive nondestructive evaluation (NDE) processes such as computed tomography (CT) x-ray scanning. While such methods provide details on flaw type and location, they require significant cost and time. Often, in production environments, significant value is gained by rapidly screening part specimens for flaws at all. Cost-effective per-specimen testing for production runs of AM parts is important for their use to be economically justified. In this work, Northrop Grumman Corporation and Virginia Tech explored impedance-based testing as a means to evaluate AM titanium specimens. Specimens with and without manually-designed flaws were fabricated through a metal- based AM process and evaluated using the impedance-based technique. CT scans confirmed that the intended flaws in the experimental specimens were present. Impedance-based examination also showed the presence of unintended defects. After machining away the unintended defective regions, the flaw-containing defective specimen had a clearly different impedance ‘signature’ than non-flawed baseline specimens. Additional analysis confirmed that the impedance test method required cheaper capital equipment and required less technician time to examine test results. Taken together, this means that the impedance-based this method can reduce the total cost of utilizing AM for metal part manufacturing. 

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2. Defect Evolution in Tensile Loading of 316L Processed by Laser Powder Bed Fusion

   https://doi.org/10.1007/s11340-021-00815-5  

   Miers, J. C.; Moore, D. G.; Saldana, C. (January 2022, Experimental Mechanics)

   Background Porosity and other defects resultant by additive manufacturing processes are well-known to affect mechanical properties. However, there remains limited understanding regarding how the internal defect structure influences the evolution of the local strain field, as experimental investigations have not presented direct measurements of the evolving internal strain field in the presence of defects. Objective Interrupted in-situ tensile tests in a lab-based X-ray computed tomography machine were used to investigate the evolution of the strain field around internal defects. The evolution of the internal strain field facilitated examination of the role of specific defects in the macroscopic deformation of additively manufactured tensile coupons. Methods Samples were produced in 316L stainless steel by laser powder bed fusion. An in situ loading device was utilized to subject the samples to tensile failure within a tomographic scanning environment. Digital volume correlation was utilized to directly determine local strain levels within the additively manufactured components in the vicinity of porosity defects. Results Effects of porosity on strain localization and eventual failure of the samples were evaluated. Characteristics of the porosity distribution, including presence of porosity at the surface or near-surface of components, as well as the proximity of pores to each other were found to influence the evolution of failure. Early onset of failure was found to be associated with the availability of neighboring porosity that allowed for rapid progression of the fracture path. Conclusions The direct measurements of strain field evolution in the present study established understanding regarding how internal defect structure characteristics influence the evolution of the local strain field for additively manufactured components. This high fidelity characterization and the associated phenomenological observations have bearing for supporting validation of numerical modeling frameworks for describing failure in these materials. 

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3. Nondestructive Evaluation of Additively Manufactured Metal Components with an Eddy Current Technique

   B. Schneider, B; Shoaib, M; Taheri, H; Koester, L; Bigelow, T; Bond, L (January 2018, ASNT 27th Research Symposium Proceedings)

   The ability of Additive Manufacturing (AM) processes to ensure delivery of high quality metal-based components is somewhat limited by insufficient inspection capabilities. The inspection of AM parts presents particular challenges due to the design flexibility that the fabrication method affords. The nondestructive evaluation (NDE) methods employed need to be selected based on the material properties, type of possible defects, and geometry of the parts. Electromagnetic method, in particular Eddy Current (EC), is proposed for the inspections. This evaluation of EC inspection considers surface and near-surface defects in a stainless steel (SS) 17 4 PH additively manufactured sample and a SS 17 4 PH annealed plates manufactured traditionally (reference sample). The surfaces of the samples were polished using 1 micron polishing Alumina grit to achieve a mirror like surface finish. 1.02 mm (0.04”), 0.508 mm (0.02”) and 0.203 mm (0.008”) deep Electronic Discharge Machining (EDM) notches were created on the polished surface of the samples. Lift off and defect responses for both additive and reference samples were obtained using a VMEC-1 commercial instrument and a 500 kHz absolute probe. The inspection results as well as conductivity assessments for the AM sample in terms of the impedance plane signature were compared to response of similar features in the reference sample. Direct measurement of electromagnetic properties of the AM samples is required for precise inspection of the parts. Results show that quantitative comparison of the AM and traditional materials help for the development of EC technology for inspection of additively manufactured metal parts. 

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4. Evaluation of additively manufactured stacks for thermo-acoustic devices

   https://doi.org/10.3397/IN-2021-2683  

   Biswas, Samarjith; Krawczyk, Zack; Manimala, James M. (August 2021, INTER-NOISE and NOISE-CON Congress and Conference Proceedings)

   The thermo-acoustic effect provides a means to convert acoustic energy to heat and vice versa without the need for moving parts. This is especially useful to construct mechanically-simple and robust energy harvesting devices, although there are limitations to the power-to-volume ratio achievable. The mechanical and thermal properties as well as geometry of the porous stack that forms a set of acoustic waveguides in thermo-acoustic devices are key to its performance. In this study, we evaluate various additively manufactured polymer stacks against more conventional ceramic stacks using a benchtop thermos-acoustic refrigerator rig that uses air at ambient pressure as its working fluid. Influence of stack parameters such as material, length, location, porosity and pore geometry are examined using experiments and correlated to simulations using DeltaEC, a software tool based on Rott's linear approximation. Structure-performance relationships are established by extracting scaling laws for power-to-volume ratio and frequency-thermal gradient dependencies. It is found that additively manufactured stacks can deliver performance comparable to ceramic stacks while being more affordable and customizable for thermo-acoustic transduction applications. 

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5. Nano Z-threading Strategy Enhanced Multifunctional Carbon Fiber Composites

   Hsiao, Kuang-Ting (November 2021, Prof. Joseph Koo WebSymposium on Polymer Nanocomposites, Advanced Materials WebCongress 2021, 16-18 November 2021.)

   Carbon fiber reinforced polymer (CFRP) composites have been increasingly used to replace metal parts in many industries such as aerospace, marine, automotive, and sporting goods. The CFRP parts compared with their metallic counter parts have the advantages of lightweight, significantly higher tensile strength, stiffer, and corrosion resistant. On the other hand, compared with many metal parts, the CFRP parts have many well-known disadvantages including the lower toughness, lower through-thickness tensile and shear strengths, lower thermal conductivity, lower electrical conductivity, and lower operating temperature. These disadvantages have made the conversion from metal parts into CFRP parts challenging and costly to design, manufacture, and maintain. The use of nanoparticles in polymer has been studied in the recent two decades. Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) and carbon nanofibers (CNFs) have been dispersed in various thermoset and thermoplastic polymers and improved the mechanical, electrical, and thermal properties; however, the properties were not comparable to CFRP. Later, researchers tried to infuse CNTs or CNFs into either carbon fiber preforms [1] or glass fiber preforms [2] for improving the mechanical properties. But the results were marginal and with great uncertainty due to the challenges of nanoparticle dispersion, filtering, and alignment while being infused through the fiber preform. The glass fiber preform experiments ended with relatively more consistent improvement than the carbon fiber preform experiments since that the glass fiber preform has significantly larger pores than the carbon fiber preform' s. The small pore size presented a great challenge for infusing millions of unaligned long CNTs or CNFs through the carbon fiber preform without being filtered. To infuse long CNFs or CNTs through the carbon fiber preform and achieve reliable improvements, especially for 55% or higher carbon fiber volume fraction with increasingly tighter pores, an innovative plan for the processing and nano-reinforcing strategy is necessary. The z-threading strategy [3, 4, 5] has been reported to have consistent experimental successes in achieving the statistically meaningful improvement in multifunctional properties. The manufacturing steps of the CNF z-threaded CFRP (ZT-CFRP) are: (1) disperse the CNFs in a resin, (2) use a strong electrical field to align the CNFs in either the B-stage epoxy film or a CNF/resin impregnated sponge layer, whereas the CNFs are aligned in the through-thickness direction of the film or sponge layer. (3) place the resin film or sponge layer on a preheated dry carbon fiber fabric and press the resin film into the hot carbon fabric and allow the resin flow to carry the well-aligned CNFs to thread through the pores in the carbon fabric. (4) cool down the resin saturated and CNF z-threaded carbon fiber fabric to obtain the ZT-CFRP prepreg. (5) use the ZT-CFRP prepreg to make the ZT-CFRP laminate. Compared with the traditional CFRP, the ZT-CFRP laminates were reported of having improvement in the Mode-I delamination toughness, interlaminar shear strength, longitudinal compressive strength, through-thickness electrical conductivity, through-thickness thermal conductivity, and can reach the carbon fiber volume fraction of 55-80%. It is an effective approach to achieve a multifunctional CFRP for potentially expanding CFRP's applications. 

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