Objective

Due to its high resource efficiency and design freedom, additive manufacturing (AM) is becoming increasingly important in industry and trade, e.g. for lightweight construction applications in aerospace or individualized medical technology products. Compared with conventional manufacturing processes, however, the choice of materials is limited, especially for metallic powder bedding processes, so that it is often not possible to use a material adapted to the product. The reason for this is the time-consuming and cost-intensive process development and qualification of new AM materials, which requires a high empirical testing effort.

The aim of the 'DigitAl' project is therefore to digitize materials development with the help of data-driven simulations and artificial intelligence (AI), making it much more efficient and cost-effective. On the basis of artificial intelligence, the following sub-steps of materials development are to be solved digitally to the greatest possible extent using the example of new aluminium alloys in the powder bed-based laser beam melting process:

• Suitability testing of new AM aluminium alloys
• Prediction of parameter windows for powder atomization and processing in the AM process
• Evaluation of alloy-specific aging effects for the assessment of recyclability

Duration: 01.09.2021 - 31.08.2024

Staff member in charge: Bastian Bossen

Funding programme: BMBF - KI4KMU

Project management agency: German Aerospace Center

Project partners:

• BlueSc.ai GmbH
• AMR Additive Manufacturing & Research