New Metallurgy of Additive Manufacturing in Metal: Experiences from the Material and Process Development with Electron Beam Melting Technology (EBM)

Abstract

Additive manufacturing (AM) is becoming one of the most discussed modern technologies. Significant achievements of the AM in metals today are mainly connected to the unprecedented freedom of component shapes this technology allows. But full potential of these methods lies in the development of new materials designed to be used specifically with AM. Proper understanding of the AM process will open up new possibilities, where material and component properties can be specifically tailored by controlling the parameters throughout the whole manufacturing process. Present paper discusses the issues related to the beam melting technologies AM and electron beam welding (EBW). We are speaking of new direction in material science that can be termed “non-stationary metallurgy”, using the examples from material and process development for EBW, electron beam melting (EBM®) and other additive manufacturing methods.