Additive manufacturing (AM) technologies present an array of benefits including lightweight structures (lattices, triply periodic minimal surfaces, and other organic shapes), consolidation of parts, limiting necessity for tooling, and lead time reduction. These benefits can help to augment manufacturing productivity, yield, and cost. For these reasons, AM has been considered for a variety of aviation, automotive, medical, energy, space, and defense applications. AM has also challenged the way manufacturing technologies are selectively utilized. AM has shown substantial merit to support rapid testing and evaluation of novel design concepts and product development has been realized for the manufacturing of test equipment, jigs, fixtures, as well as test parts. AM also offers the ability to impact product life cycle cost as a repair technology.
The majority of metal AM product development in the last decade has focused on legacy alloys historically developed for casting or forging applications. In recent history, the AM community has started to informally refer to these materials as the first generation of AM materials. Within the last seven years, there have been select endeavors to explore and promote improvement in material performance by modifying the physical and chemical characteristics of feedstock material. These may include modification of select alloying additions (to the low or high end of the specified alloy element concentration range) or adjustments to the material particle size distribution in the case of powder metals and are referred to as the second generation of AM materials. The third generation are alloys developed with AM as their primary manufacturing method that may feature chemical compositions substantially different from those available commercially.