On the Necessity for Improving Effectiveness of Qualification Process for Spare Parts Additive Manufacturing in a Circular Economy Supply Chain

Additive manufacturing (AM) has attracted extensive research attention, due to the flexibility and capability to deal with additive manufactured (AM ‘ed) parts with complicated geometries. Benefiting from the recent development of material technology, manufacturing control tools, and integrated platforms, powder bed fusion (PBF) based AM has been successfully extended to build free form metallic parts. A more comprehensive understanding of the powder processing thermos mechanical metallurgical characteristics correlation is still lacking for the metallic AM. The metallic AM process involves non-uniform temperature distributions and rapid thermal cycles that result in microstructures featured with porosity and anisotropy. The different microstructure features critically affect the mechanical properties of the AM’ed parts. It is necessary to establish optimal parameters’ combination that provides predefined microstructure in an AM process to achieve desired mechanical properties of the AM builds. The AM’ed parts qualification is a requirement to assure accurate and repeatable builds. First, this manuscript demonstrates the use of parameter design approach for simulations and experimental validation to establish optimal parameter combinations to develop a qualification record. Second, it presents a framework illustrating how to perform feedstock metal powder production, AM of parts, qualification, and reuse of material in an integrated circular economy supply chain.