Wire-Arc Additive Manufacturing of Steel Components for Aerospace
Add to calCrowne Plaza Royal Victoria Sheffield and online
The penultimate lecture of this year’s program will be given by Dr Ed Pickering of Manchester University and has the title: 'Wire-Arc Additive Manufacturing of Steel Components'.
Wire-arc additive manufacturing (WAAM) is a metal 3D printing technique that involves the layer-by-layer deposition of melted wire. It’s essentially an extension of multi-pass welding, but with the weld metal making up the entirety of the component, and is performed using robots to carefully control the deposition conditions. It operates on a larger scale that other metal AM techniques (e.g., powder AM), as it can produce parts that are metres in size. WAAM potential to produce medium-large scale parts for many engineering sectors, including aerospace, power generation, and defence. Its adoption is likely to be especially beneficial for applications in which we waste a lot of material during conventional manufacturing (e.g., by machining away most of a forging to produce a complex shape).
A key metallurgical challenge to the adoption of WAAM is that the microstructures of parts in the as-built state can be heterogeneous (like in multi-pass welds), which is not ideal for engineering applications. This talk will provide an introduction to WAAM, its advantages and disadvantages, and will explore the metallurgical phenomena at work during WAAM of steel, and how we might control some of them.
The lecture will be in person at the Crowne Plaza Royal Victoria Hotel Sheffield and online. Tea and coffee will be available from 1800 and the lecture will start at 1815. We aim to finish around 7.15pm. Non-members are welcome.
All our lectures are simultaneously broadcast online via Zoom which you can access using the following links: Zoom webinar ID: 896 2632 8280 Password - SMEA1894
