Alloy design via additive manufacturing: Advantages, challenges, applications and perspectives

TLDR

Additive manufacturing has transformed production across industries by enabling ground‑up design that overcomes traditional manufacturing constraints, particularly accelerating alloy development beyond the slow, casting‑based methods of the past. The article aims to outline the benefits, obstacles, uses, and future outlook of alloy design through laser‑based additive manufacturing. It reviews how directed energy deposition and powder bed fusion enable rapid, cost‑effective alloy innovation and evaluation. The authors anticipate that this synthesis will guide researchers and industry professionals in creating new alloys with metallic AM for current and emerging applications.

Abstract

Additive manufacturing (AM) has rapidly changed both large- and small-scale production environments across many industries. By re-envisioning parts from the ground up, not limited to the challenges presented by traditional manufacturing techniques, researchers and engineers have developed new design strategies to solve large-scale materials and design problems worldwide. This is particularly true in the world of alloy design, where new metallic materials have historically been developed through tedious processes and procedures based primarily on casting methodologies. With the onset of directed energy deposition (DED) and powder bed fusion (PBF)-based AM, new alloys can be innovated and evaluated rapidly at a lower cost and considerably shorter lead time than has ever been achieved. This article details the advantages, challenges, applications, and perspectives of alloy design using primarily laser-based AM. It is envisioned that researchers in industry and academia can utilize this work to design new alloys leveraging metallic AM processes for various current and future applications.