The aim of this study is to experimentally investigate the fatigue behavior of additively manufactured (AM) NiTi (i.e. Nitinol) specimens and compare the results to the wrought material. Additive manufacturing is a technique in which components are fabricated in a layer-by-layer additive process using a sliced CAD model based on the desired geometry. NiTi rods were fabricated in this study using Laser Engineered Net Shaping (LENS), a Direct Laser Deposition (DLD) AM technique. Due to the high plateau stress of the as-fabricated NiTi, all the AM specimens were heat-treated to reduce their plateau stress, close to the one for the wrought material. Two different heat treatment processes, resulting in different stress plateaus, were employed to be able to compare the results in stress- and strain-based fatigue analysis. Straincontrolled constant amplitude pulsating fatigue experiments were conducted on heat-treated AM NiTi specimens at room temperature (~24°C) to investigate their cyclic deformation and fatigue behavior. Fatigue lives of AM NiTi specimens were observed to be shorter than wrought material specifically in the high cycle fatigue regime. Fractography of the fracture surface of fatigue specimens using Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) revealed the presence of microstructural defects such as voids, resulting from entrapped gas or lack of fusion and serving as crack initiation sites, to be the main reason for the shorter fatigue lives of AM NiTi specimens. However, the maximum stress level found to be the most influential factor in the fatigue behavior of superelastic NiTi.
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Fatigue-Damage Initiation at Process Introduced Internal Defects in Electron-Beam-Melted Ti-6Al-4V
Electron Beam Melting (EBM) is a widespread additive manufacturing technology for metallic-part fabrication; however, final products can contain microstructural defects that reduce fatigue performance. While the effects of gas and keyhole pores are well characterized, other defects, including lack of fusion and smooth facets, warrant additional investigation given their potential to significantly impact fatigue life. Therefore, such defects were intentionally induced into EBM Ti-6Al-4V, a prevalent titanium alloy, to investigate their degradation on stress-controlled fatigue life. The focus offset processing parameter was varied outside of typical manufacturing settings to generate a variety of defect types, and specimens were tested under fatigue loading, followed by surface and microstructure characterization. Fatigue damage primarily initiated at smooth facet sites or sites consisting of un-melted powder due to a lack of fusion, and an increase in both fatigue life and void content with increasing focus offset was noted. This counter-intuitive relationship is attributed to lower focus offsets producing a microstructure more prone to smooth facets, discussed in the literature as being due to lack of fusion or cleavage fracture, and this study indicates that these smooth flaws are most likely a result of lack of fusion.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1822186
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10407409
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Metals
- Volume:
- 13
- Issue:
- 2
- ISSN:
- 2075-4701
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 350
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.3390/met13020350
